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EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 


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THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

N«W  YORK  •    BOSTON  •   CHICAGO  •   DALLAS 
ATLANTA  ■    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limitkd 

LONDON  •   BOMBAY  •   CALCUTTA 
MBLBOURNK 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

ESSAYS   ON  THE   WAR   AND 
THE  FUTURE 


BT 

HENRY  SEIDEL  CANBY,  Ph.D. 

PB0FESS03  IN,  TAiE  'TOrVEJlSITT 


■)  ■> 


.■•TV     u>.'vr     '-vv. 


.^<>,     ''''^ 


NetD  Yorit 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

1919 

AU  right*  reterted 


COPYBIGHT,  1918, 

By  The  Ontnrj  Company,  by  the  Tale  Pablishin?  Association,  Inc., 
by  Harper  and  Brothers,  and  by  the  Atlantic  Monthly  Company. 

•  '    Sd^yr.lG^^llJlC',  , 

By  HorpftrVad  Brj(tbfl?g,  i!)y*Tlif  Qs^Jury  Company, 
asd  hy,  ^3  Yale  Publishing'Assqbiittion,  Jnc. 

'     '.      •  '*•*■'. 

•  «     •     ••  ,  .».'*. 

•  ,•  V«  *  dornMrn;  -1919,        •      .  •  • 

,«•••  '••«,«  ,•*       • 

,    ',     bt  the  iIacMiiIu^  coMPAanrj  •  ■ 
• •  •«  .     , 

*         S«t  up  and  eIectkttfye<L '  ^blished  March,  xgiQ* 


••  •       •     •      •  • 

•    •  •••••••  »*•  •  •     • 

•  •  •      •  » » 
••••••                                        •     • 

•  ••  •  ••  •      * 


Korfsooti  Tfnu 

J.  8.  Cushln^  Co.  —  Berwick  A  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


So  t|ie  i^emots  of 
WALTER  mNES  PAGE 

LATE  AMBASSADOR  TO  GREAT  BRITAIN 

WHOSE  DEVOTION   TO  THE  CAUSE 

OF  MUTUAL  UNDERSTANDING 

AMONG  THE  ENGUSH-SPEAKING  PEOPLES 

WAS  A  CONSTANT  HELP  AND  INSPIRATION  TO 

THE  AUTHOR  OF  THIS  BOOK 


INTRODUCTION 

In  the  fat,  green  days  before  1914,  a  book  was 
made  in  a  manner  that  had  become  almost  con- 
ventional. You  lived,  you  studied,  you  thought, 
and  then  retired,  like  an  expectant  mother,  to  some 
mental  solitude,  where  the  travail  in  due  and  decor- 
ous order  was  ended,  and  the  book  came  forth 
complete.  But  in  this  book,  conceived  in  war  time 
and  finished  in  the  early  days  of  peace,  I  have 
been  subject  to  a  different  ordering.  Life  burned 
intensely  in  1918.  The  battle-front,  the  tumult- 
uous humanity  behind  the  lines.  Great  Britain  and 
France  at  war,  where  I  was  a  humble  observer, 
flung  imperious  summons.  Ideas,  hopefully  in- 
terpretative of  the  surging  forces  loose  everywhere, 
shot  into  the  mind,  sometimes  in  a  trench,  some- 
times in  a  munitions  factory,  on  a  steamer  deck, 
or  at  midnight  in  Piccadilly,  and  would  wait  only 
for  the  quiet  of  an  Oxford  garden,  or  the  peace  of 
a  room  high  hung  in  Kensington  above  a  park 
cheery  with  thrushes,  to  be  worked  out  as  far  as 
the  uncertainties  of  the  time  would  permit. 

As  I  wrote,  then  and  later,  I  felt  there  was  only 
vii 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

one  question:  What  will  come  afterward?  —  and 
that  reflections  upon  race  and  education  and  work- 
ing women  and  fighting  men  were  all,  like  the  game 
of  Twenty  Questions,  aimed  at  one  answer.  The 
next  generation  may  find  that  answer.  I  see  only 
a  little  further  now  that  the  war  is  over,  than  in 
April  of  1918,  when  Hardy's  President  of  the  Im- 
mortals seemed  about  to  play  his  own  game  with 
our  ideals  and  our  little  strengths  behind  them. 
The  ideas  begin  to  fall  together ;  one  sees  the  con- 
necting links  and  I  have  written  in  many  of  them 
in  brief  transitional  and  prefatory  sections ;  but 
these  essays  are  still  most  valuable,  if  valuable  at 
all,  as  historical  evidence  of  how  the  war  and  its 
aftermath  affected  one  American  mind.  And 
hence  I  have  left  them  much  as  they  were  first  con- 
ceived :  some  with  the  memory  of  last  night's  bomb- 
ing behind  the  words,  or  the  intense  sense  of  racial 
contrast  felt  by  an  alien  who  finds  himself  among 
comrades  and  friends ;  others  written  in  the  dawn 
of  peace  and  looking  forward  to  a  future  full  of 
urgency  and  promise  and  doubt.  And  though 
only  one  bears  that  title  all  —  the  first  four  on  in- 
ternational relationships,  the  fifth  on  morale,  the 
sixth  and  seventh  on  education,  the  eighth  on  re- 
construction, and  the  ninth  on  war's  ending  —  all, 
and  the  brief  prefatory  essays  that  precede  them, 
present  the  fruits  of  education  by  violence. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I  wish  to  acknowledge  the  kindness  of  the 
editors  of  Harper's  Magazine  for  permission  to 
reprint  "  Transport  106,"  Education  by  Violence, 
and  Spes  Unica;  The  Century  Magazine  for 
Blood  and  Water,  Innocents  Abroad,  and  When 
Johnny  Comes  Marching  Home;  The  Atlantic 
Monthly  for  The  Irish  Mind;  and  The  Yale 
Review  for  Tanks  and  War's  Ending. 


CONTENTS 

PAGB 

Introduction vii 

Acknowledgments ix 

I    On  Writing  the  Truth      ....  1 

"Transport  106" 6 

n    On  the  English 29 

Blood  and  Water 82 

m    On  Irish  Literature           ....  55 

The  Irish  Mind 57 

rV    On  the  Sense  of  Race       ....  83 

Innocents  Abroad 86 

V    On  Morale  .......  104 

Spes  Unica 107 

VI    On  the  Uncommon  Man     ....  128 

Tanks 130 

Vn    On  the  Personal  in  Education        .        .  152 

Education  by  Violence      ....  155 

Vm    On  the  Next  War 179 

When  Johnny  Comes  Marching  Home     .  182 

IX    On  Salvage  and  Waste      ....  208 

War's  Ending 211 

zi 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 


ON  WRITING  THE  TRUTH 

In  the  last  great  crisis  of  the  war,  in  the  time 
of  the  rush  over  the  Chemin  des  Dames,  and  of 
Chateau  Thierry  and  Compiegne,  I  was  a  visitor 
on  the  British  Front  at  the  chateau  of  Rollen- 
court,  where  the  accredited  correspondents  were 
—  I  can  think  of  no  more  fitting  word  than  — 
interned.  All  day  we  were  off  in  motors,  buzzing 
the  long  white  roads  back  of  the  front,  chatting 
in  dug-outs,  adventuring  in  quiet  trenches,  lunch- 
ing with  courteous  generals  in  sound  of  sleepy 
guns,  breasting  column  after  column  of  marching 
men  —  blue  poilus  weary  for  their  rest  camp, 
fresh  Americans,  like  brown  helmeted  legionaries, 
striding  loose-limbed  toward  the  front,  careless 
Australians,  .  .  .  And  at  tea  time  we  would  swing 
back  into  the  shaded  avenue,  where  Tommies  in 
"  shorts  "  were  running  races  on  the  turf,  and 
down  past  the  turreted  columbiere  to  the  sweeping 
fa9ade  of  the  seventeenth  century  chateau. 

In  a  salon,  by  a  table  covered  with  maps  and 
pipes,  under  pictures  of  the  haute  noblesse  of  the 
province,  we  had  tea,  while  the  correspondents 

B  1 


2  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

swapped  their  "  facts  "  and  withheld  their  "sto- 
ries," smoked  each  his  cigarette,  and  retired, 
thoughtful,  to  grind  out  his  column  for  the  world's 
reading.  At  seven  their  work  was  ready  for  the 
censor;  at  eight  we  dined,  a  criss-cross  of  banter 
and  argument ;  at  ten  came  the  communique,  relax- 
ing the  tension  (for  things  were  going  badly  in 
Champagne)  ;  and  then  to  bed  in  a  high  ceilinged 
chamber,  stuccoed  in  Louis  Seize. 

Midnight,  and  a  Boche  plane  whirred  over  (we 
heard  his  bombs  on  poor  St.  Pol)  ;  then  dreamless 
sleep,  and  a  May  morning,  mists  and  dew  in  that 
gentle  vaUey,  he  of  the  "  Mail "  reading  Horace 
as  he  walked  in  the  aisles  of  the  lush  garden,  he  of 
the  *'  Times  "  walking  with  me  by  the  shadowy 
river,  trying  to  forget  the  war.  And  at  ten,  out 
from  that  valley  of  peace,  to  the  noisy  roads,  the 
dust,  the  guns,  the  "  crump  "  of  the  shells,  the 
plodding,  horrible,  fascinating  machine  of  war. 

A  curious  life.  The  soldier  has  little  time  to 
think.  He  is  too  weary,  too  frightened,  too  busy, 
or  too  dull.  The  civilian  cannot  think  of  war  as 
war.  It  is  too  unreal  for  him.  But  these  men 
whose  names  have  come  to  our  breakfast  tables 
with  the  coffee  cups,  were  neither  innocents, 
naively  pushing  toward  victory,  nor  civilians 
dreaming  afar  off.  Daily  they  saw  war,  and 
nightly  they  came  back  to  their  garden. 

And  truth  of  thought  for  them  became  a  differ- 
ent thing  from  truth  of  writing.  No  war  has 
been  so  honestly,  so  faithfully  reported  as  this  one. 
The  correspondent  has  put  into  words  all  but  his 
thinking.     Not  all,  of  course,  for  the  censor  ac- 


ON  WRITING  THE  TRUTH  8 

tually  or  potentially  deprived  us  daily  of  many 
sensations  in  opinion  and  experience.  But  that 
which  ever  remained  unwritten,  which  had  to  re- 
main unwritten,  was  the  meditation  of  these  high- 
bred, thoughtful  men,  trained  to  observe  with 
minds  that  the  broadest  culture  as  well  as  expe- 
rience in  the  field  had  made  keenly  observant. 

And  on  what  did  they  meditate?  Not,  as  they 
wished,  upon  literature  and  music  and  free  inter- 
course with  men  living  free  of  war's  restrictions 
(they  welcomed  the  visitor  just  because  he  was  an 
outsider)  ;  but,  so  it  seemed  to  me,  constantly  and 
broodingly  upon  the  mystery  of  war.  Their 
minds  reacted  from  opinions  on  strategy,  praise  of 
bravery,  word  pictures  forming  and  reforming  of 
pitiful  fugitives  streaming  southward,  broken 
towns,  and  airplanes  shining  among  shrapnel  puffs. 
They  talked  of  the  art  of  Henry  James,  but 
brooded,  or  so  I  thought,  upon  the  causes  of  all 
this  turmoil,  the  effect  of  this  stirring  up  of  all  the 
passions  upon  the  future.  In  my  quiet  talks  with 
them  when  the  days'  sights  were  seen  and  recorded 
for  the  millions  at  home,  I  heard  much  that  did  not 
go  into  their  articles ;  and  it  was  most  of  it  specu- 
lation upon  the  significance  of  war. 

Privileged  observers,  safe  themselves  except  for 
chance  shots  or  bombing,  with  time  for  thinking, 
they  could  watch  the  war  as  the  scientist  in  his 
laboratory  watches  through  his  lens  the  conflict  of 
microcosms  in  a  drop  of  water.  And  they  felt 
with  intensity  what  we  visitors  and  many  soldiers 
dimly  felt,  that  the  whole  truth  had  not  been  said, 
could  not  yet  be  said  about  the  war.     The  lesser 


4  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

truth,  that  the  Germans  had  willed  the  war,  that 
they  must  be  beaten,  was  for  the  time  more  impor- 
tant. More  light,  in  1918,  would  have  made  us  see 
less  clearly.  The  greater  truth,  the  causes  lying 
behind  all  wars,  including  this  one,  the  good  effects 
of  war  which  should  be  gained  otherwise,  the  bad 
effects  of  war,  which  should  be  defined,  and  known, 
and  hated  —  all  this  they  stored  in  their  hearts. 
For  this  truth  they  seemed  to  be  constantly  grop- 
ing, though  often  in  an  hour's  talk  only  a  hint,  a 
phrase,  an  ejaculation  revealed  the  undercurrent 
of  painful  inquiry  beneath  the  immediate  business 
of  the  day. 

Men  like  these,  and  the  soldiers  fortunate  enough 
to  have  kept  their  intellects  free  and  clear  in  the 
grind  of  the  trenches,  will  begin  to  write  this  truth 
now.  Neither  we  who  saw  the  war  by  glimpses,  nor 
those  prophetic  critics  who  wrote  of  modern  war 
before  it  became  a  universal  experience,  can  give 
the  evidence  which  must  be  presented.  The  time 
begins  to  be  ripe  for  true  writing.  The  crisis  of 
war  is  over;  the  crisis  of  readjustment  is  upon  us; 
the  penalty  for  plunging  blindly  upon  new  curves 
leading  inevitably  to  new  conflicts,  lies  measurably 
ahead.  Free  speech  is  safe  now,  or  rather,  noth- 
ing else  is  safe  for  us.  We  have  had  narrative, 
description,  poetry,  and  philosophy  of  the  war; 
we  have  not  had  that  inner  burning  thought  forced 
upon  reflective  minds  by  danger  and  horror  and 
waste  and  splendid  bravery.  The  war  is  over.  Let 
us  open  our  minds  and  allow  no  left-over  scruples 
of  anxious  patriotism  to  suppress  the  best  of  all 
patriotism,  which  is  the  truth  born  of  devotion  to 


ON  WRITING  THE  TRUTH  5 

one's  fellow  man.  The  truth  about  the  war,  when 
it  is  written,  will  please  neither  pacifist  nor  milita- 
rist ;  neither  preacher  nor  business  man ;  but  it  may 
help  to  set  them  free  from  errors  long  deluding. 
The  germs  of  war,  like  the  germs  of  all  diseases, 
we  carry  about  us.  There  is  no  cure  for  a  serious 
infection;  but  there  is  an  antiseptic,  the  truth 
freely  spoken.  The  real  literature  of  the  war, 
when  it  comes,  will  speak  to  an  open  mind,  and  such 
a  mind  I  ask  for  the  more  modest  endeavor  of  these 
essays. 


"TRANSPORT  106" 

This,  of  course,  was  not  her  real  number,  nor 
can  I  tell  her  name,  which  is  of  little  importance 
in  comparison  with  her  true  designation,  the  May- 
flower sailing  eastward,  with  four  thousand  Amer- 
icans outward  bound,  and  many  a  homegoing 
Ally.  It  was  a  strange  voyage,  as  different  from 
anything  conceivable  in  peace-time  as  impressive 
dreams  from  trivial  realities.  Day  after  day  our 
striped  and  spotted  convoy  herded  through  plung- 
ing seas.  Behind  us  a  gray  transport,  like  a  beau- 
tiful dolphin,  dipped  to  rise  as  if  for  a  jump, 
shook  her  bow  free,  surged  forward  until  we  could 
see  the  pink  of  massed  faces  on  her  hoisting-deck, 
then  dropped  again  astern.  Ahead,  a  converted 
liner  swung  backward  and  forward  like  an  anxious 
mother;  and  clear  to  the  sea-rim  great  zebra- 
monsters  followed  us,  tankers  laboring  hull  under, 
horse-boats,  transports,  a  grim  cruiser  shepherd- 
ing their  flanks,  winking  angrily  at  laggards, 
guiding  and  hurrying  our  rear. 

Day  after  day,  somewhere  in  the  ocean,  we 
plodded   eastward,  until,   one   morning,  we   saw 

6 


"TRANSPORT  106"  7 

through  the  haze  a  row  of  tiny  destroyers  sitting 
on  their  haunches  like  a  pack  of  hounds  in  wait 
for  us.  The  midmost  nosed  our  mother  ship  and 
swung  astern  of  her,  swaying  drunkenly  like  a  toy 
tin  ship  in  a  tub ;  the  rest  spread  fan-wise  through 
the  ocean.  Dusk  comes  and  greener  water.  Sig- 
nals blink,  and  the  big,  gray  boats  behind  us  quiver 
and  turn  inward,  setting  their  prows  down  gin- 
gerly into  the  dangerous  waves.  Within,  the 
corridors  of  the  great  ship  are  lit  with  dim  purple 
lights.  High,  gloomy  curtains  sway  with  the  roll 
before  every  door.  It  is  a  scene  from  the  palace 
of  Manfred.  Soldiers  guard  the  stairways,  and 
voices  are  suddenly  hushed  as  from  the  merriment 
inside  some  one  steps  into  the  gloom,  hears  the 
swish  of  the  waves,  thinks  of  the  great  ships  beside 
him  stealing  through  the  darkness,  shudders  a 
little,  and  goes  back.  But  in  the  lounge  there  is 
a  blaze  of  light,  card-playing,  singing,  French  les- 
sons, war-talk,  a  nervous  grip  on  a  life-preserver 
now  and  then,  yet,  in  spite  of  tension,  the  atmos- 
phere of  a  friendly  club.  In  the  morning  boat- 
drill  with  life-preservers,  the  officers  like  yellow 
chicks  with  pieces  of  shell  clinging,  the  little  cock- 
ney in  his  flapped  overcoat  like  a  belted  caterpil- 
lar. The  company's  champions  box  in  the  cock-pit 
aft.  Through  a  hedge  of  gaitered  legs  one 
catches  sight  of  stout  calves  twisting,  jerking,  and 


8  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

now  and  then  a  supple  waist.  They  jump  up 
against  a  blue  horizon,  clinch,  swing,  clinch,  and 
down  out  of  sight  again.  From  every  watch- 
point  the  lookouts  scan  the  gray-green  Irish 
water.  "  Wreckage,  red,  ninety  degrees,"  they 
call,  and  we  see  kegs,  planks,  boxes,  in  sad  trails 
bleeding  upward  from  a  gaping  wound  in  some 
good  ship,  pirate-sunk  beneath  us. 

This  is  the  setting  merely  of  Transport  106, 
but  it  is  important  because  its  subdued  inten- 
sity was  like  a  screen  of  quivering  light  against 
which  men's  characters  were  vividly  flung.  Indeed 
I  write  of  her  not  to  describe  our  strange  reversion 
to  the  perils  of  the  first  emigrations,  but  because 
she  staged  the  prologue  of  a  drama  of  interna- 
tional character  whose  action  will  continue 
through  our  times.  A  man  wise  enough  might 
have  used  our  ship's  company  as  a  laboratory  for 
infinite  tests  and  discoveries.  We  had  Americans 
of  every  useful  class  aboard  —  officers  and  enlisted 
men,  government  officials,  diplomats,  members  of 
special  missions,  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  Red  Cross  work- 
ers, business  men ;  and  most  of  the  officers  and  all 
of  the  three-thousand-odd  soldiers  below  were  cam- 
ouflaged civilians  drawn  from  every  business  pro- 
fession and  trade.  We  had  a  British  Cabinet 
Minister,  an  M.  P.,  a  dozen  majors  and  captains, 
a    score   of   business    representatives.      We    had 


"TRANSPORT  106"  9 

Scotch,  Irish,  Parisians,  French-Canadians,  Aus- 
tralians, Italians.  We  had  a  leavening  of  woman- 
kind, wives  and  stenographers.  It  was  the  Ark, 
which  also  was  representative  of  all  save  the  enemy 
ahen.  But  it  took  months  in  the  curiously  changed 
atmosphere  of  England  and  France,  with  Ameri- 
cans curiously  changed  also,  before  I  could  inter- 
pret the  life  aboard  her. 

A  remark  of  Bernard  Shaw's  crystallized  the 
problem.  I  doubt  whether  the  prayer  I  saw  em- 
broidered upon  a  sampler  in  Mr.  Shaw's  living- 
room  in  Adelphi  was  ever  answered,  if  proffered: 

Let  me  be  kind  to  all,  I  pray. 
And  never  faults  of  others  say. 

But  though  Mr.  Shaw  has  left  the  rough  work 
of  contemporary  satire  to  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  who 
has  made  it  a  sub-department  of  his  manufactory 
of  new  worlds,  nevertheless  of  all  men  in  our  time 
he  is  best  able  to  make  those  incisive  phrases  that 
grip  and  hang  upon  the  mind  until  it  turns  and 
fights  it  out  with  the  ideas  coursing  behind  them. 
"  The  possibility  of  anything  like  international 
federation,"  he  said,  swinging  backward  and  for- 
ward in  his  chair  with  the  peculiar  nervous  dignity 
characteristic  of  the  man,  "  depends  upon  the  ex- 
istence of  psychological  homogeneity  among  con- 
tracting nations.     If  the  idealists  do  not  get  hold 


10  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

of  the  scheme  and  try  to  swallow  it  at  one  bite,  it 
will  work  out." 

Month  by  month,  as  I  saw  in  England,  in  Ire- 
land, in  France,  and  at  the  front  the  infinite  im- 
portance of  racial  personality  —  how  it  wrecked 
armies,  won  victories,  frustrated  diplomacy,  and 
in  every  crisis  was  a  great  X  whose  equivalent  we 
were  seldom  permitted  to  know,  Mr.  Shaw's  phrase 
sank  farther  into  my  mind.  Are  the  nations,  in  this 
respect,  psychologically  homogeneous?  Do  they 
need  to  be.'*  What  is  the  psychological  homoge- 
neity necessary  for  the  joint  action  in  the  future 
which  we  all  crave.'*  These  questions  are  ever  re- 
turning. And  my  thinking,  whether  it  begins  in 
a  trench  in  Lorraine,  or  a  Sinn  Fein  meeting,  or  an 
English  week-end  conversation  with  some  person- 
age "  uncorked  "  by  the  intensity  of  the  times, 
always  carries  back  to  Transport  106. 

There  were,  as  I  have  said,  representatives  of  all 
the  potential  high  contracting  Powers  not  enemy 
aboard,  and  if  Americans  were  in  heavy  majority, 
that  was  in  just  proportion  to  our  perhaps  dom- 
inating influence  upon  the  new  world-order  to  fol- 
low this  war.  It  was  an  instructive  experience  to 
live  in  pleasure  and  in  danger  for  sixteen  days  with 
this  advance-guard  of  re-migrating  America.  At 
home  we  had  become  a  little  skeptical,  before  the 
war,  as  to  the  racial  individuality  of  the  American. 


"TRANSPORT  106"  11 

When  your  butcher  is  German,  your  plumber  Irish, 
your  shoe-shiner  Greek,  your  fruiterer  Italian, 
your  best  friend  the  son  of  a  Scandinavian,  the 
sense  of  race  weakens.  I  am  an  American,  you 
say,  but  what  are  these  others?  One  of  the  great 
experiences  of  Europe  in  war-time  was  to  find  the 
American,  even  the  hyphenated  American,  running 
true  to  a  type  that  the  foreigner  recognized  as 
valid.  In  uniform  or  out  of  it,  even  if  he  never 
opens  his  mouth,  there  is  never  a  question  in  Eu- 
rope to-day  as  to  whether  a  man  is  American. 

Every  attempt  to  define  a  race  as  a  whole  (the 
French  as  frivolous,  for  example)  breaks  down; 
nevertheless,  I  believe  that  most  observers  of  the 
year  1918  in  Europe  would  agree  with  the  charac- 
terization I  made  of  our  Americans  on  Transport 
106.  Rouglily  speaking,  they  were  divided  into 
Americans  serious-minded  and  Americans  earnest- 
minded,  with  a  few  sophisticated  individuals  too  de- 
tached to  classify.  I  understood  very  well  the  re- 
mark months  later  of  a  well-known  woman  in  Lon- 
don, herself  a  transplanted  American :  "  You  seem 
to  me  now,"  she  said,  "  a  grim  people.  I  have  to 
put  a  '  Jock  '  or  a  '  Tommy  '  into  every  American 
ward  of  my  hospital  to  make  our  boys  laugh. 
Americans  take  life  so  seriously !  "  That,  in  spite 
of  joke-cracking  and  teasing,  was  the  impression 
we  made  on  shipboard,  and  in  France  and  England 


12  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

also.  I  have  seen  a  good-natured  mob  of  sailors 
and  doughboys  fling  slang  at  one  another  under 
the  nose  of  the  King  at  a  Fourth  of  July  ball-game 
in  London;  and  I  have  heard  a  squad  of  fresh 
"  rough-necks  "  from  the  plains  "  jolly  "  a  High- 
land officer  for  his  too-pink  knees ;  but  neverthe- 
less, whenever  I  think  of  the  American  overseas  I 
seem  to  see  a  tall,  lean,  capable  fellow  with  a  pre- 
ternaturally  solemn  face,  and  earnest  eyes  only  now 
and  then  lightening.  "  How  solemn  they  look," 
passed  from  mouth  to  mouth  of  the  crowd  in  Man- 
chester as  three  thousand  of  ours  marched  by. 
"  They  must  be  real  fighters." 

I  could  have  explained,  for  I  had  lived  with  such 
solemn  youths,  all  the  way  over.  It  was  not 
merely  the  effect  of  a  new  world  and  the  approach 
to  the  war,  although  these  had  their  part.  There 
was  something  deeper,  and  politicians  at  home  and 
abroad  would  do  well  to  take  note  of  it.  Persh- 
ing's Army  has  been  well  named  a  crusade. 
Whether  it  is  climate,  or  heredity,  or  an  inexpli- 
cable race  development,  there  is  a  curious  nervous 
intensity  in  the  American  when  he  is  roused  that 
is  quite  different  from  anything  they  know  in  Eu- 
rope. Scarcely  a  "  Tommy  "  or  a  poilu  but  knew 
twice  as  thoroughly  what  the  war  meant  in  loss 
and  endeavor  as  the  most  imaginative  American, 
and  yet  they  did  not  take  it  so  hard.     The  war 


"TRANSPORT  106"  13 

with  them  had  become  like  a  cold  in  the  head ;  they 
felt  it  always  and  so  never  got  excited  over  it. 
Nevertheless,  good  foreign  observers  say  they 
never  were  so  "  grim,"  even  in  1914,  as  these  Amer- 
icans. 

There  are  two  kinds  of  American  grimness,  as  I 
learned  very  quickly  on  our  transport.  The  first, 
which  I  have  called  serious-mindedness,  springs 
from  the  moral  nature,  is  rarer  than  mere  earnest- 
mindedness,  more  intelligent,  and  in  the  long  run 
perhaps  more  effective.  I  know  nothing  equal  to 
its  intensity  except  the  fanatic  idealism  of  certain 
Irish  leaders  and  the  bulldog  tenacity  of  the  pure- 
bred southern  Englishman.  It  is  a  genuine  sur- 
vival of  the  hard-fighting  Puritanism  that  the  sev- 
enteenth century  hammered  to  stay  into  the  Amer- 
ican temperament. 

Sometimes  it  appears  as  a  determined  protest- 
antism, as  with  the  grizzled,  square-set  Westerner 
who  spent  long  days  scowling  across  the  unfamiliar 
wastes  of  ocean.  "  I  sure  love  a  fight,"  he  said, 
"  and  I  expect  to  enjoy  myself  over  there.  But  I 
hate  war.  Don't  believe  in  it.  I  was  a  captain  in 
the  Spanish  War.  Ninety  per  cent  of  my  com- 
pany were  no  good  afterward,  spoiled  by  graft  and 
*  hand-outs.'  By  God,  this  military  game  has  got 
to  stop  !  That's  why  I've  left  my  family  to  scratch 
for  a  living,  and  come  in.  Fighting  for  fun's  all 
right,  but  not  war !  " 


14  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

Sometimes  it  is  intellectual.  I  sat  in  the  smok- 
ing-room through  a  rolling  afternoon  with  a 
Princeton  graduate,  a  "  casual  "  on  special  and 
important  service.  "  I  like  the  thinking  part  of 
the  work,"  he  said  as  we  talked,  "  but  the  men  get 
on  my  nerves.  They  are  so  monotonous.  We 
were  all  monotonous,  grubbing  little  animals  in 
America.  There  had  to  be  a  war  to  save  us.  If 
I  come  back  (later  he  was  wounded,  "  degree  un- 
determined ")  I'm  going  in  with  all  my  might  to 
make  life  more  worth  living  for  the  common  man, 
poor  or  rich." 

Sometimes  it  is  naively  humorous.  Three 
doughboys  leaned  over  the  rail,  talking  of  their 
superiors.  "  The  officers  are  clean-cut  and  pretty 
well  educated,"  one  said,  "  but  they  aren't  as  good 
as  the  men.  I  could  'a'  been  an  officer,  if  I'd  waited, 
but  this  business  didn't  seem  to  stand  waiting.  I'm 
content,  as  I  am.  The  officers  don't  take  the  war 
seriously  enough  for  me." 

These  are  random  instances,  but  there  is  noth- 
ing random  in  the  enormous  energies  that  tens  of 
thousands  of  Americans  in  the  army,  the  Y.  M. 
C.  A.,  the  Red  Cross,  and  elsewhere  have  loosed  for 
the  physical  and  moral  betterment  of  our  men  and 
of  Europe.  Having  applied  the  "  uplift "  to 
pretty  much  everything  in  America,  we  are  now 
trying  to  uplift  war,  an  undertaking  worthy  of  a 


"TRANSPORT  106"  15 

vigorous  and  unsophisticated  race;  and  I  am  not 
sure  that  we  shall  not  succeed.  Certainly  in 
twenty  years  I  have  not  encountered  so  many  vital 
forces  incandescent  with  enthusiasm,  so  many 
serious-minded,  intensely  active  men  working  pas- 
sionately for  humanity,  as  in  six  months'  associa- 
tion with  the  most  devastating  war  in  history. 

Germany  presents  no  parallel.  Neither  does 
France ;  her  efforts  are  in  different  (though  no  less 
valuable)  directions.  The  Briton  is  as  strong  to 
save  as  we ;  but  the  British  "  uplift  "  is  more  polit- 
ical and  economic,  and  in  the  hands  of  the  intel- 
lectuals and  radicals  chiefly.  It  is  perhaps  better 
thought  out,  but  lacks  the  fire  and  universality  of 
the  American  endeavor,  which  more  resembles  a 
national  religion  than  a  movement  for  social  re- 
form. The  moral  nerve  of  America  has  been  set 
vibrating  by  the  war. 

Four-fifths  of  our  Americans  aboard,  however, 
I  should  have  called  earnest-  rather  than  serious- 
minded;  and  these  are  the  men  who  have  most 
deeply  impressed  Europe  in  her  hour  of  need.  Less 
is  to  be  said  of  them  because  their  psychology  is 
simpler.  In  comparison  with  the  British  officers, 
bred  at  Eton  or  in  the  rich  tradition  of  the  old 
army,  our  boys  seemed  milky,  unripe,  over-earnest, 
lacking  the  poise  of  men  of  the  world,  undisciplined 
in  mind.    They  freely  told  th^ir  stories,  and  these 


16  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

were  curiously  alike.  A  hustling  five  or  six  years 
of  successful  business,  a  wife,  a  chUd,  a  motor-car, 
a  big  deal  ahead,  then  a  switch  turned  at  Wash- 
ington, and  their  nervous  energy  slanted  toward 
war. 

There  was  not  much  clear  thinking  in  this  group, 
and  no  reflection.  I  could  see  that  Fribourg,  the 
Parisian,  thought  them  admirable  barbarians. 
Taken  one  at  a  time,  indeed,  they  had  less  individ- 
uality than  the  English  officer,  but  their  group 
energy,  their  group  single-mindedness  on  the  prac- 
tical problem  of  getting  the  war  won  impressed  the 
Europeans.  Behind  their  eagerness  lay  a  sense  of 
right  and  duty  as  vague  as  the  Indian's  Great 
Spirit,  and  in  this  respect  the  difference  between 
officer  and  enlisted  man  was  curiously  slight.  If 
you  asked  either  why  we  were  in  the  war,  you  got 
very  unsatisfactory  answers.  The  average  Amer- 
ican seemingly  is  not  subtle  enough  to  phrase  the 
moral-intellectual  reasons  which  set  him  going, 
although  he  feels  them  with  a  kind  of  race  instinct 
and  knows  very  well  that  "  canning  the  Kaiser  " 
merely  saves  him  the  trouble  of  thinking  them  out. 
But  the  earnest,  unreflecting  energy  of  these  prac- 
tical, intelligent  men  proved  the  very  medicine  for 
a  military  crisis.  They  asked  in  Europe  for  de- 
tached and  statesman-like  thinking  on  world  prob- 
lems and  we  were  fortunate  enough  to  have  a  Pres- 


"TRANSPORT  106"  17 

ident  who  could  give  it  to  them.  They  asked  for 
immediate  energy  to  meet  force  by  fresh  force,  and 
we  gave  that  also,  millions  strong. 

It  was  three  Americans  with  their  look  of  ear- 
nest resourcefulness  that  Gallenga-Stuart  saw  —  I 
heard  him  teU  the  story  in  London.  They  were 
taking  down  the  bronze  horses  from  in  front  of  San 
Marco.  He  watched  them  carried  one  by  one 
across  the  lagoon  of  the  Giudecca  in  the  sunset, 
saw  the  palaces  crashed  down  from  the  air  raids, 
knew  that  Venice  was  being  abandoned,  feared  the 
Piave  line  would  not  hold,  then  turned  to  see  three 
Americans  in  khaki  standing  together  in  the  piaz- 
zetta,  and  took  heart. 

In  striking  contrast  to  the  Americans,  the  Brit- 
ish on  Transport  106  exhibited  neither  moral  nor 
nervous  intensity,  and  this  difference  was  true  of 
aU  the  castes  and  breeds  represented  there.  The 
Briton  runs  from  tenacious  traditionalism  in  the 
south,  through  shrewd  commercialism  in  the  mid- 
lands and  the  north,  to  cool  and  educated  democ- 
racy in  Scotland,  and  westward  to  Wales  and  Ire- 
land in  ever-increasing  richness  of  sentiment;  and 
his  social  order,  of  course,  is  stratified  in  stone. 
But  in  the  dewlapped  cockney  who  had  left  Lon- 
don only  in  the  flesh,  the  Indian  officer,  aristocrat 
of  the  old  army,  and  the  spare  Scotch  capitalist 
alike,  there  was  a  vital  difference  from  our  Ameri- 
c 


18  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

cans.  I  think  it  was  best  defined  as  sense  of  race, 
something  of  which  we  are  far  less  conscious.  The 
war,  I  discovered,  and  had  no  cause  to  change  my 
opinion  later,  was  for  them  a  far  more  intimate, 
personal  business  than  for  us.  They  had  moved 
in  response  to  it  precisely  as  the  leg  moves  when 
the  knee  nerve  is  struck.  Not  a  man  but  thought 
and  acted  in  terms  of  the  British  tradition;  while 
we,  even  the  least  reflective  among  us,  were  bur- 
dened with  the  thought,  "  Now  we  must  create  our 
America." 

It  was  this  that  explained,  I  suppose,  the  diver- 
sity and  freedom  of  opinion  on  the  war  that  one 
encountered  among  these  British,  and  found  later 
in  press,  oratory,  and  private  conversation  in  Eng- 
land. Our  straining  toward  a  single  view  of  the 
war  seemed  unnatural,  if  not  hysterical,  to  one  re- 
turning from  Europe;  seemed  the  very  antithesis 
of  liberty.  But  the  cause  is  simple.  United  (if 
one  leaves  out  Ireland)  in  the  sense  of  race,  the 
British  dared  be  more  diverse  in  sentiment  than 
we,  dared  to  let  their  minds  run  ahead  to  recon- 
struction'after  the  war,  to  the  vast  problems  that 
the  military  crisis  had  raised.  We  were  more 
timorous.  We  put  the  war  on  like  a  garment 
of  which  we  were  self-conscious.  The  Englishman 
carried  it  as  naturally  as  his  skin. 

I  remember  the  first  divine  service  on  board,  in 


"TRANSPORT  106"  19 

mid-ocean  —  ports  closed,  lights  lit,  the  sonorous 
voice  of  the  ship's  officer  reading  sentences  from 
Ecclesiastes  so  poignant  that  the  heart  rose  to 
meet  them :  "  Wisdom  is  better  than  weapons  of 
war;  but  one  sinner  destroyeth  much  good." 
"  Whatsoever  thy  hand  findeth  to  do,  do  it  with  all 
thy  might:  for  there  is  no  work,  nor  device,  nor 
knowledge,  nor  wisdom,  in  the  grave,  whither  thou 
goest."  And  from  Joel :  "  Rend  your  heart,  and 
not  your  garments."  One  could  see  these  stoic 
phrases  in  that  setting  of  duty  and  danger  strike 
upon  the  tense  imaginations  of  the  young  Ameri- 
cans. To  the  Briton,  they  were  part  of  the  estab- 
lished service  for  ships  on  lawful  occasions.  Such 
sudden  commands  to  forget  individualism  and  meet 
the  crisis  appeal  not  so  much  to  his  will  and  con- 
science as  to  his  fine  sense  of  race.  He  takes  them 
dumbly  where  he  sits,  like  Masefield's  English 
farmers  in  the  poem  "October,  1914";  we  rise 
and  strain  forward  to  respond. 

I  could  illustrate  this  vital  difference  between 
the  nations  from  every  deck  of  Transport  106  as 
we  voyaged  through  the  winter  ocean,  from  the 
British  and  American  fronts,  from  England  at 
large,  but  it  is  too  fundamental,  and  at  the  same 
time  too  little  developed,  for  conclusive  illustra- 
tion. Now  that  victory  has  inclined  our  way,  and 
the  great  discussions  have  begun,  the  differences 


20  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

between  two  like-minded  peoples,  one  fighting  to 
save  and  justify  her  racial  best,  the  other  to  prove 
her  right  to  responsible  nationality,  will  become 
evident. 

The  French  on  the  transport  I  have  mentioned, 
and  just  mentioned,  which  accurately  defines  their 
status.  If  we  had  had  officers  on  board  it  would 
have  been  different,  for  we  would  have  sat  at  their 
feet  with  questions  of  strategy.  If  it  had  been 
peace-times,  and  professional  matters  of  literature, 
art,  or  applied  science  had  concerned  us,  it  would 
have  been  different.  But  in  that  atmosphere  of 
international  reactions  the  Parisian  officials  of  our 
company  went  just  so  far  and  no  farther.  I 
would  plod  round  the  deck  for  hours  with  the  Brit- 
ish major,  in  silence  first,  then  a  word  or  two,  then 
a  stream  of  talk,  in  which  we  differed  and  under- 
stood each  other.  The  British  meet  as  good  dogs 
meet  —  first  suspicion,  then  indifference,  then,  af- 
ter what  seems  to  us  five  good  minutes  wasted,  en- 
tire geniality.  But  when  M.  Fribourg  and  I  walked 
the  pace  was  fast,  the  conversation  animated  and 
radiant  with  easy  friendliness.  It  sparkled,  it 
slackened;  suddenly  a  fear  of  boredom  came  over 
him ;  he  smiled,  he  slipped  through  a  doorway,  and 
was  gone  until  to-morrow.  Our  minds  touched 
circumferences  easily  (there  is  a  flexibility  in  the 
French  mind  far  more  American  than  English), 
bounded  along  together,  then  bounced  apart. 


"TRANSPORT  106"  21 

Thousands  of  Americans  will  come  back  from 
France  bearing  testimony  to  this  experience.  Talk 
to  one  of  our  soldiers  now  of  the  Australian,  the 
Canadian,  the  "  Tommy,"  and  he  will  become  vol- 
uble in  characterization,  favorable  or  unfavorable. 
Ask  him  about  the  poilu,  and  he  will  say  merely: 
"Oh,  he's  all  right.  I  like  him."  And  that  is 
about  as  far  as  you  get,  for  it  is  as  far  as  he  has 
gone.  Paris  is  one  beam  of  friendliness  now  for 
the  visiting  American,  yet  even  habitues  like  my- 
self get  farther,  but  only  a  little  farther,  into  the 
French  personality,  the  Frenchman  where  he  lives, 
than  before  the  war,  whereas  in  England  one  pro- 
gresses more  in  a  week  now  than  in  a  year  before 
1914. 

And  the  reason  is  important.  The  French  are 
at  the  same  time  the  most  civilized  and  the  most 
self-centered  of  modern  nations.  Civilization, 
their  civilization,  is  for  them  what  the  sense  of  race 
is  for  the  British.  The  German  propaganda  for 
"Kultur  "  reminds  me  of  a  big  boy  who  learns  a 
tune  and  swaggers  down  the  street,  threatening  to 
lick  every  little  boy  that  will  not  whistle  it.  The 
French  have  had  a  better  tune  for  generations,  and 
whistled  it  to  themselves.  That,  by  preference,  is 
what  they  will  continue  to  do.  Not  that  they  are 
exclusive  with  their  culture.  On  the  contrary, 
Paris  has  always  been  open  to  the  foreigner.     But 


82  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

you  must  come  to  France,  France  will  not  come 
to  you.  The  Englishman  stays  English,  but  he 
goes  all  over  the  world  and  is  interested  in  the  full- 
ness thereof.  The  Frenchmen  on  our  transport 
had  adventured  that  once  to  America ;  the  English 
had  been  there  half  a  dozen  times  before  the  war. 
When  I  was  in  Paris  the  critics  were  making  fun  of 
Bourget  on  account  of  his  taste  for  traveling. 
What  could  he  see  that  could  not  better  be  seen 
at  Paris.?  Stendhal's  vaunted  cosmopolitanism 
amounted  to  liking  Milan  as  well  as  France. 

World  politics  for  the  Frenchman,  in  fact,  is 
simply  the  problem  of  preserving  intact  French 
civilization;  his  motives  therein  are  negative 
rather  than  positive.  The  missionary  spirit  bled 
out  of  the  race  in  the  Napoleonic  era ;  the  fear  of 
being  duped,  the  desire  to  be  "fine  "  rather  than 
energetic,  neutralize  under  ordinary  circumstances 
the  native  love  of  glory  and  great  spiritual  ges- 
tures ;  and  this  balance,  far  from  being  a  national 
fault,  is  merely  the  accompaniment  of  a  perfected 
civilization.  We  may  expect  in  France  a  reservoir 
of  cool,  strong  thinking  to  which  a  half-barbarized 
world  may  go  to  be  cured.  Indeed,  one  hears  the 
hope  frequently  expressed  that  her  almost  irreme- 
diable depletion  of  life  will  be  in  part  made  good 
by  tens  of  thousands  of  Americans  and  English, 
who,  when  our  vast  armies  ebb  home  again,  will  be 


"TRANSPORT  106"  2S 

held  by  inertia  or  attraction  and  become  French. 

The  Frenchman  knows  his  culture  is  worth  sav- 
ing, and  at  all  costs  will  save  it ;  but,  as  the  world 
cannot  be  made  French,  he  will  be  willing  to  leave 
world-planning  to  his  allies.  Time  and  again,  as 
our  talk  on  the  transport  ranged  from  Japan  to 
Chile  and  dealt  with  perplexing  questions  as  to  how 
a  world  sweating  race  prejudice  and  thinking  of 
blows  and  parryings  could  be  brought  into  some 
possible  order  by  which  all  might  profit,  I  saw  the 
look  in  M.  Fribourg's  face  which  said  "  this  bores 
me."  I  had  to  remind  myself  that  without  French 
military  genius,  French  coolness  and  realism,  with- 
out, in  short,  the  incomparable  mind  of  French 
civilization,  this  war  wovdd  have  been  lost. 

We  were  all  friends  by  the  time  Transport  106 
had  reached  her  "  port  on  the  Irish  Sea,"  and 
there  had  been  no  international  incident  except  an 
Anglo-American  squabble  over  the  best  way  to 
umpire  deck  tennis.  A  common  danger,  a  com- 
mon resolve  to  down  the  German,  a  common  liking 
held  together  our  diverse  racial  personalities.  But 
Transport  106,  microcosm  as  she  was  of  the  pres- 
ent confederation  against  Germany,  was  not  nec- 
essarily a  prototype  of  the  peace  conference.  Al- 
lies in  war  sometimes  change  their  behavior  when 
they  meet  to  contrive  a  new  world-order  that  will 
work  for  all  and  (especially)  for  each.     Did  these 


24  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

national  types,  as  different  as  breeds  of  dogs, 
promise  sufficient  psychological  homogeneity  to 
stand  the  strain? 

If  we  are  to  aim,  now  that  the  war  is  over,  at  a 
mere  balance  of  power  among  self-centered,  ego- 
tistical states,  emphatically  no.  There  was  too 
much  psychology  and  too  little  homogeneity 
among  these  nationals  for  hope  in  such  a  future. 
Give  the  driving,  but  none  too  reflective,  energy 
of  the  American  a  slant  toward  commercial  dom- 
ination, and  it  will  shatter  such  fragile  interna- 
tionalism like  a  bomb  in  a  greenhouse.  Cloud  and 
thicken  the  racial  pride  of  the  British  and  it  turns 
into  that  obstinate  John-Bullism  which  has 
*'  r'iled  "  us  and  made  France  furious  before.  Let 
the  French  concern  for  a  fine  civilization  be 
touched  with  a  cynical  indifference  as  to  the  fate 
of  other  nations,  and  her  policies  will  cross  more 
often  than  parallel  ours. 

Again,  if  we  are  to  aim  at  an  international  state, 
such  as  socialists,  pacifists,  and  many  historical 
thinkers  prophesied  before  the  war,  then  no  hope- 
ful evidence  was  to  be  drawn  from  our  transport. 
If  we  are  to  expect  a  truly  international  state,  like 
the  later  Roman  Empire,  French,  Americans,  and 
English  should  be  able,  as  were  the  Mediterranean 
races  of  the  fourth  century,  to  exchange  environ- 
ments and  live  mingled  together  without  sensible 


"TRANSPORT  106"  25 

inconvenience.  The  Briton  might  succeed  in  this 
for  a  while.  He  bears  his  race  with  him.  The 
American  very  seldom.  The  Frenchman  never. 
All  might  emigrate  into  a  new  land  like  our  ances- 
tors and  make  a  new  nation,  for  they  intermarry 
without  prejudice,  which  is  the  first  test  of  homo- 
geneity.    But  that  is  a  different  proposition. 

In  truth,  only  two  groups  aboard  our  boat  were 
fit  for  the  international  state  as  dreamers  have 
devised  it.  The  first  comprised  the  tolerant  intel- 
lectual Jews,  especially  the  American  Jews.  Like 
nursery  plants,  their  roots  are  close-gathered  for 
easy  transportation.  They  understand  all  races 
and  are  at  home  everywhere ;  and  this  makes  the 
Jewish  intellectual  an  advance-guard  of  that  in- 
ternationalism which  is  surely  coming,  but  not  in 
our  time,  nor  in  the  form  which  theorists  have  de- 
picted. The  others  were  Irish,  the  richest-blooded, 
most  alive  of  all  our  ship's  company,  always  ready 
to  turn  every  argument  toward  the  woes  of  Ire- 
land, always  debating,  and  never  convinced. 
Michael  Massey,  the  last  of  the  O'Donovans,  pre- 
siding over  every  meeting,  both  cause  and  judge  of 
every  altercation,  was  the  incarnation  of  the  uni- 
versal minority,  which,  being  against  every  con- 
stituted power,  is  therefore  truly  international. 
He  and  his  kind  are  sacred  vessels  for  that  idealism 
which  never  makes  compromise  with  a  material 
world  run  dully  on  business  principles. 


«6  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

Is  there  hope,  then,  for  a  federation  of  nations, 
however  rudimentary?  As  soon  as  we  cease  mak- 
ing paper  constitutions  for  it  and  begin  to  build 
upon  what  we  have,  it  will  find  its  sanctions  quickly 
and  impressively.  These  racial  personalities  I 
have  been  describing  are  facts  that  tell  neither  for 
nor  against  the  probability  of  world  federation. 
They  are  like  the  differences  in  character  among 
the  individuals  who  make  up  a  nation.  That  John 
is  a  very  different  fellow  from  James,  and  James 
as  a  personality  very  unlike  Tom,  does  not  prove 
that  they  will  be  unable  to  keep  the  peace  in  the 
same  village,  if  village  life  appeals  to  them.  The 
important  question  is  not  their  temperamental  dif- 
ferences, but  rather  those  similarities  in  habit  and 
desire  which  make  communal  living  possible. 

Temperamental  homogeneity  one  does  not  find 
in  a  village,  and  racial  homogeneity  I  did  not  dis- 
cover on  Transport  106,  but  similarity  of  thought 
in  those  principles  upon  which  joint  action  must 
be  based  was  very  marked.  Our  international 
group  did  sufficiently  hold  in  common  ideas  of 
equity,  of  the  rights  of  the  individual,  and  the 
duties  of  the  state ;  and  if  a  difference  of  opinion 
arose,  the  cleavage,  as  within  a  nation,  ran  between 
temperaments  and  philosophies,  not  between  local 
or  racial  units.  The  Liberal  Londoner,  the  Radi- 
cal Frenchman,  the  sometime  candidate  of  the  Pro- 


"TRANSPORT  106"  27 

gressive  Republicans  joined  forces  against  the 
Tory  M.  P.,  the  French  legitimist,  and  the  Rhode 
Island  judge.  And  on  every  question  that  an  in- 
ternational council  might  have  to  discuss,  there 
was  on  one  side  a  majority  also  drawn  from  all 
nations,  and  on  the  other  a  minority  also  drawn 
from  all  nations.  This,  I  submit,  is  a  true  basis  for 
the  only  international  government  we  are  likely  to 
desire  in  our  time  —  free  nations  pooling  for  dis- 
cussion and  majority  action  their  questions  of  in- 
ternational policy,  precisely  ^s  they  have  been 
pooling  their  international  trafde. 

Transport  106,  after  all,  was  a  little  world,  sail- 
ing through  space.  All  the/fetrong  desires,  pos- 
sessive, belligerent,  idealistic,  sentimental,  moral, 
and  immoral,  which  govern  action  in  the  great 
world,  were  vivid  among  us. !  The  characters  of 
men  we  represented  will  be  the  same  in  1920  as 
1918.  And  if  we  were  sailing  in  the  bond  of  a 
common  purpose  to  defeat  the  enemy,  nevertheless 
there  will  be  other  common  purposes  in  which  Brit- 
ish, French,  Americans,  and  (unless  history  this 
time  fails  to  repeat  itself)  reconstructed  Germans 
can  join.  It  is  true  that  the  war  has  deepened  and 
enriched  racial  personality,  and  this  is  most  for- 
tunate, for  if  we  come  to  a  federation,  its  value  will 
depend  upon  the  worth  of  those  federated.  But 
even  while  we  hesitate  and  are  skeptical  of  any 


28  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

world  order,  a  homogeneity  of  thought  and  emo- 
tion is  preparing  in  which  the  strongest  and  most 
individual  nations  most  readily  can  join. 


n 

ON    THE    ENGLISH 

What  I  most  envy  in  the  Englishman  is  his  free- 
dom of  mind.  He  is  so  sure  of  his  loyalties,  and 
his  prejudices,  and  his  essential  relations  with  the 
island  he  lives  in ;  he  is  so  conscious  of  race  that  he 
dares  to  be  individual.  His  character  is  like 
his  climate:  it  has  no  angles  in  it.  Looking  into 
his  mind  is  like  gazing  from  Piccadilly  Circus  down 
Regent  Street  and  across  the  hazy  park  to  hazier 
Parliament  towers.  It  is  all  blended  and  misted 
into  smoothness,  with  a  good  solidity  behind. 

What  he  seems  most  to  envy  in  us  is  the  defi- 
niteness  of  our  minds,  which,  like  our  atmosphere, 
are  sharp  and  clear.  He  finds  them  naive  and  in- 
vigorating ;  naive  because  so  many  things  — 
changes,  for  example  in  dwelling  place,  or  political 
philosophy,  or  business  systems,  or  religion  — 
seem  easy  to  us ;  invigorating  because  in  our 
clearer  air  we  are  constantly  looking  ahead,  to 
uplifts,  or  reforms,  or  efficiencies. 

When  his  racial  consciousness  encounters  ours 
there  is  often  a  collision.  That  is  because  we 
travel  on  the  same  line,  but  with  different  speeds 
and  occasionally  in  opposite  directions.  We  are 
both  blessed  and  handicapped  by  fundamentally 
understanding  each  other.     Words  which  in  the 

29 


so  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

mouth  of  an  Italian  would  not  trouble  him  because 
they  would  be  unheeded,  in  my  mouth  rouse  him 
to  anger.  Mannerisms  which  would  amuse  me  in 
a  Frenchman,  irritate  me  sadly  if  he  uses  them. 
Why  should  an  Englishman  be  so  affected  in  ac- 
cent (I  say),  being  after  all  Anglo-Saxon?  Why 
should  an  American  (he  says)  differ  with  me  in 
opinion,  being  fundamentally  English?  And  so 
we  quarrel  easily  like  two  dogs  tied  to  a  single 
rope.  The  best  international  friendships  are  be- 
tween English  and  Americans,  and  also  the  live- 
liest (though  not  the  deepest)  international  preju- 
dices. 

We  should  therefore  send  as  many  Americans  as 
possible  to  England  in  the  years  following  the  war, 
and  bring  as  many  English  as  possible  here.  It  is 
an  invaluable  experience  for  us  to  see  what  manner 
of  men  we  would  have  been  like  if  we  had  not  broken 
loose  our  civilization  from  its  ancient  moorings. 
An  American  is  inclined  to  take  stock  after  such  an 
experience.  He  feels  a  little  flimsy,  a  little  de- 
tached, like  a  commercial  traveler  stepping  from  a 
train  into  a  long-established  home.  And  it  will 
be  good  for  the  English  to  feel  by  contact  how 
readily  the  mind  we  share  in  common  can  slough  off 
fat  and  ancient  prejudices,  and  what  happens  to 
it  when  set  free. 

Of  course  we  mixed  before  the  war.  But  that 
was  different.  We  Americans  were  self-sufficient 
then;  we  went  abroad  to  see,  not  to  mix  with,  our 
ancestral  world.  Germany  was  an  irritant ; 
France  was  pleasure;  Belgium  a  triviality;  Eng- 
land a  deep  satisfaction  mingled  with  surprise  at 


ON  THE  ENGLISH  81 

the  lack  of  geniality  among  its  inhabitants.  We 
never  thought  of  ourselves  in  relation  to  a  world 
state ;  we  might  well  have  dropped  down  from  Mars 
with  return  tickets  in  our  pockets.  And  as  for 
the  English,  they  were  still  thinking  of  all  the 
English-speaking  world  as  colonials  —  clever,  rich, 
energetic  —  but  still  colonials.  As  late  as  1914 
we  were  still  felt  to  be  colonials  who  must  neces- 
sarily think  as  England  thought.  We  seemed 
therefore  mere  recreants  when  we  hesitated  before 
entering  the  war. 

It  is  all  changed  now.  The  American  has  taken 
up  the  white  man's  burden  of  learning  to  live  with 
other  white  men.  He  is  no  longer  safe  from  inter- 
national complications,  even  in  Kansas.  And  the 
Englishman,  in  the  hour  when  his  fine  traits  of  race 
have  turned  into  steel  and  met  the  test,  has  sud- 
denly dropped  his  barriers,  put  on  humility,  and 
asked  to  be  friends. 

"  Why  do  these  British  officers  say,  *  Ah  real-ly  ' 
and  '  Sorry,'  and  '  Herry  on.'"  "  asked  two  Arkan- 
sas doughboys  in  St.  Valery  one  day.  "  Can't 
they  talk  English!  " 

"  How  can  you  Americans  have  central  heat- 
ing," murmured  the  apple-cheeked  daughter  of  an 
Oxford  professor,  "  when  you  know  it's  bad  for 
the  health?  " 

Of  such  inessentials,  leading  to  effrontery  on  the 
one  sid^^  and  superciliousness  on  the  other,  is  our 
international  prejudice  made  up.  And  therefore, 
if  we  learn  to  respect  racial  differences,  ours  will 
be  a  great  friendship ;  for  our  quarrels  have  been 
the  quarrels  of  relatives  and  friends. 


BLOOD    AND    WATER 

I  have  heard  that  "  blood  is  thicker  than  water," 
and  that  the  British  are  our  "  cousins  "  until  I  am 
sick  of  these  platitudes.  Let  me  try  to  give  some 
better  reasons  for  the  faith  within  us,  that  the 
compact  now  formed  among  English-speaking 
peoples  is  durable  and  may  solve  even  harder  prob- 
lems than  "  winning  the  war."  But  first  I  must 
sketch  in,  no  matter  how  hastily,  the  traits  of  con- 
temporary Great  Britain,  a  nation  strangely  al- 
tered. 

It  was  in  the  midst  of  the  confusion  of  an  air 
raid  that  I  began  my  observations.  Indeed,  I  did 
not  know  I  was  in  dark  London  on  that  night  in 
1918  until  through  the  windows  of  my  train  I  saw 
waving  search-lights  and  stepped  into  a  clatter  of 
invisible  crowds  and  the  confusing  rumble  of  un- 
seen vehicles.  An  hour  later  the  signal-guns 
boomed.  There  was  a  rush  of  giggling  maids  past 
my  hotel  door,  —  one  was  to  die  the  night  after,  — 
and  the  voice  of  the  hall  porter  was  heard  ordering 
every  one  below.  I  followed  to  a  crypt  below  the 
basement,  the  farther  end  of  which  was  open  to  the 
street.     A  fainting  woman  was  carried  past  me; 

32 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  3S 

behind  her  were  little  toddlers,  sleepy-eyed,  with 
coats  over  their  undershirts ;  cockneys  from  the 
near-by  slums ;  men  and  women  in  evening  dress ; 
officers  —  a  curious  assemblage.  Last,  as  the  bar- 
rage fire  began  to  rattle  above,  came  a  solemn  pro- 
cession of  railway  guards  from  the  station,  each 
with  his  lantern.  One  tipped  over  a  biscuit-box 
and  offered  me  an  end.  "  Sit  down,  sir,"  he  said. 
We  sat  together  and  talked  of  England.  "  Thank 
God  the  Americans  have  come !  "  he  said.  "  The 
war  is  demoralizing  England.  The  labor  unions 
are  selfish.  The  people  are  losing  sight  of  every- 
thing great  behind.  Their  courage  is  only  self- 
preservation." 

Two  shaky  cockneys  with  bleared  eyes  edged  up 
beside  to  listen.  A  bomb  fell,  shaking  our  refuge 
with  sullen  tremors ;  the  barrage  redoubled. 

"  Best  throw  up  the  sponge.  Ah  say,"  one  of 
the  cockneys  muttered;  the  twist-back  beside  him 
agreed.     My  guard  turned  upon  them  angrily. 

"  That's  you  and  your  kind !  I  say  Germany 
'  11  'ave  to  be  punished  for  her  sins.  We'U  see 
this  through."  The  crowd  was  with  him.  On  the 
steps  a  group  of  girls  and  workmen  began  to  sing ; 
bugles  sounded  the  "  all  clear."  Quietly  we  sep- 
arated. 

Thus  I  first  met  England  as  she  was,  pessimistic, 
self-critical,  determined.     Neither  hope  deferred 


34  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

nor  reverses  could  change  this  strong  determina- 
tion. It  was  a  race  trait,  displayed  in  France  and 
Flanders  and  behind  every  action  at  home,  the 
product  of  long  inheritance,  doubly  intensified  by 
four  years  of  conflict. 

This  is  the  first,  and  just  now  the  most  impor- 
tant quality  of  that  British  character  which  in 
better  or  in  worse  we  must  learn  to  know  more 
sympathetically  than  we  as  a  nation  have  known 
any  race  outside  our  borders.  We  shall  not 
wholly  love  it ;  most  probably  we  shall  admire  it ; 
we  must  understand  its  dominant  qualities  as  they 
have  been  hardened  or  altered  by  war.  But  of 
that  curious,  dogged  determination  that  makes  the 
puny,  undersized  East-Londoner  a  better  soldier 
for  the  defensive  than  either  the  Australian  or  the 
Canadian,  the  American  desires  merely  to  be  re- 
assured. It  is  the  new  humility  of  the  British  that 
most  needs  explanation. 

We  have,  for  example,  grossly  misunderstood 
the  part  that  Great  Britain  has  played  in  this  war. 
We  have  taken  the  Englishman  in  particular  at 
his  own  published  valuation.  Now,  tlie  English- 
man, although  he  has  a  reputation  for  self- 
superiority,  is  actually  diffident,  self-critical,  and 
obstinate  in  national  self-depreciation.  He  has 
filled  his  papers  and  our  own  for  four  years  with 
complaints  of  his  inefficiency  and  mistakes.     He 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  S5 

has  written  far  more  of  the  humorous  experiences 
of  his  "  Tommies  "  than  of  the  remarkable  organ- 
ization of  the  First  Expeditionary  Army  or  the 
astounding  transformation  of  central  Great  Brit- 
ain into  a  workshop  of  military  supplies,  where  for 
hours  in  the  train  one  never  lost  sight  of  the  ma- 
chinery of  war.  He  has  told  us  far  more  of  the 
asinine  incapacity  of  his  leaders  than  of  the 
right-about  march  of  England  from  the  easy  ways 
of  commerce  or  leisure,  accomplished,  one  sup- 
poses, under  these  very  men.  The  British  have 
not  boasted,  they  are  certainly  not  boasting  now; 
but  with  a  kind  of  shamefaced  grumble,  "  we've 
been  grousing  too  much,"  they  are  willing  as  never 
before  to  be  judged. 

The  truth  is  that  the  Englishman  has  always 
been  fiercely  intolerant  of  the  faults  of  his  coun- 
trymen, and  therefore,  by  natural  continuation, 
on  the  defensive  against  nations  without.  Nor 
can  one  deny  a  belief  in  racial  superiority.  It  is 
all  this  that  made  him  the  reserved  and  supercilious 
person  who  became  the  "type  "  Britisher  for  us 
in  America.  The  trait  was  preferable  to  German 
self-assertion,  but  it  was  not  lovable.  And  now  it 
has  changed.  To  see  the  "  haughty  Englishman  " 
as  he  was,  you  must  go  to  Ireland,  where  special 
and  most  unfortunate  circumstances  still  automat- 
ically develop  all  that  is  most  unhappy  in  the  Brit- 


S6  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

ish  breed.  At  home  it  is  a  different  story.  For 
weeks,  to  cite  a  trivial  instance,  I  looked  for  the 
well-known  figure  who  refuses  to  speak  except  un- 
der compulsion,  and  found  instead  quiet  men  in 
railway  carriages  who  made  excuse  of  the  least  in- 
cident of  travel  to  ask  for  American  impressions, 
and  would  give  gladly  in  exchange  from  their  years 
of  bitter  experience.  At  last  I  met  him,  churlish, 
silent,  cold,  as  he  sat  beside  me  each  morning  in  the 
breakfast-room  —  only  to  learn  that  he  was  deaf, 
stone-deaf ! 

Or,  for  a  better  example.  General  Sir  Archibald 
Murray,  late  commander  of  the  Palestinian  army, 
took  me  through  Aldershot,  that  marvelous  organ- 
ization where  every  detail,  whether  in  the  bombing 
school,  the  gas  school,  cavalry,  or  infantry,  is 
devised  to  train  muscle  and  mind  together,  an  edu- 
cational establishment  of  the  first  order,  whether 
for  war  or  peace. 

"  If  we  could  put  all  England  through  such 
training  after  the  war,"  he  said,  "  the  English 
workman  could  finish  his  task  in  six  hours  a  day 
and  have  time  to  live  and  be  happy  and  be  a  man. 
But  now  when  we  do  send  them  through,  they  kill 
them." 

I  saw  his  point,  and  realized,  too,  the  essential 
humility  of  the  remark.  England  was  aware  of 
its  neglects  and  its  failures,  and  as  ready  now  for 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  S7 

sympathy  with  its  new  undertakings  as  in  the  past 
it  had  been  indifferent  to  criticism  from  without. 

I  do  not  know  how  efifective  the  British  general 
is  in  the  field ;  no  one  will  know  until  long  after  the 
war.  It  is  certain  that  he  has  made  his  mistakes. 
I  do  not  know  how  much  leadership  in  a  time  of 
confusion  is  to  be  found  in  English  statesmen. 
Certainly  England  lacks  now  such  definite  leader- 
ship as  President  Wilson  has  given  America.  But 
this  I  know  from  experience,  and  since  I  am 
estimating  racial  character  rather  than  racial 
achievement,  it  is  important,  in  several  months  of 
association  with  naval  officers,  with  army  officers 
of  all  ranks,  with  public  officials  of  all  conditions 
from  the  War  Cabinet  down,  and  with  a  multitude 
of  unassorted,  not  once  did  I  miss  the  new  note.  — 
**  It  has  been  a  hard  four  years.  We  are  glad 
America  is  with  us.  You  see  that  at  least  we  are 
*  carrying  on.'  " 

Yes,  once  I  missed  it,  in  a  munition  superinten- 
dent traveling  with  me  through  northern  Wales. 
It  was  in  the  midst  of  the  spring  offensive. 

"  You'll  see  what  England  is  now,"  he  said. 
*'  She  has  to  be  almost  beaten.  It  was  so  in  Ed- 
ward I's  time.  It  always  will  be  true."  This  is 
the  spirit  of  determination ;  but  it  is  precisely  not 
the  dominant  note  of  this  new  England  which  has 
learned  with  a  humility  dangerous  for  arrogant 


88  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

enemies  that  stubbornness  without  science  and  hard 
work  and  a  will  for  the  future  as  well  as  a  memory 
of  the  past  is  not  enough.  No  American  remem- 
bering our  martial  enthusiasm,  can  guess  at  the 
burden  of  armament  upon  Great  Britain,  of  the 
eflFect  of  the  daily  sacrifice  of  young  life,  of  the 
darkening  of  existence  that  resulted  from  strain 
long  continued.  **  There  is  no  joy  in  life  now," 
said  one  of  the  most  vigorous  and  hopeful  of  the 
ministry  workers.  "  Spring  is  a  mockery."  But 
there  was  gain  as  well  as  loss. 

The  third  racial  characteristic  springing  to  new 
life  in  this  war  is  energy,  but  energy  of  a  new  kind 
that  is  worth  studying  in  America.  I  went  through 
vast  ranges  of  clanging  shops,  airy,  well  lighted, 
perfect  in  modern  equipment  and  completeness, 
and  all  built  upon  what  was  swamp  or  common  two 
years  ago.  I  saw  I  do  not  know  how  many  thou- 
sands of  men  and  women  busy  over  every  instru- 
ment of  death  devised  for  this  conflict,  cheery, 
healthy,  content,  as  seldom  before  the  war.  Over- 
all skirts  mingle  with  overall  trousers  down  the 
long  lines  of  machine  tools.  One  sees  silk  stock- 
ings beneath  rough  working-garments,  jewelry  at 
the  throat  of  blackened  working-blouses,  mob-caps 
on  fresh  faces  of  girls  who  laugh  as  they  turn  and 
smooth  the  shells.  An  old  granny  fishes  out  red- 
hot  shell  rings  like  loaves  from  an  oven.     A  pretty 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  S9 

creature  bombards  a  casting  with  hammer  blows 
in  rhythm. 

There  is  energy  in  brains,  too.  Each  great  gov- 
ernment plant  was  provided  with  its  enthusiastic 
specialists,  captains  who  begged  you  to  smell  their 
new  gas,  majors  who  could  think  only  in  terms  of 
engines,  organizers  who  were  passionately  eager 
that  you  should  understand  in  five  minutes  the 
work  of  two  years.  What  were  these  men  and 
women  before  the  war.^*  I  asked  unceasingly;  and 
rarely  I  found  a  decline  in  condition.  Usually 
energy  had  been  released.  It  may  be  disconcert- 
ing to  discover  that  clerks  in  munition  plants  were 
once  educational  experts  —  few  people  were 
what  they  seemed  to  be  in  England,  —  but  it  was 
thrilling  to  meet  a  duke's  daughter  assembling 
parts,  and  heartening  to  find  cricketers  and  fox- 
hunters  happy  in  real  work  that  for  thousands  a 
year  they  would  not  have  turned  to  before,  or  girls, 
once  shop  assistants  or  idle  "  flappers,"  now  rosy 
from  exercise,  filing  or  hammering  for  good  wages, 
or  swinging  with  strong  arm-sweeps  the  passengers 
on  board  a  bus,  one  grade  up  at  least  from  the  un- 
healthy conditions  of  our  bad  world  as  it  was  in 
1913. 

But  when  I  saw  the  finished  product  of  all  this 
new  energy,  great  howitzers  beside  their  vast  car- 
riages, shells  by  the  million,  hangars  of  flying- 


40  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

boats  (sperm-whales  with  broad  wings,  each  a 
marvel  undreamed  of  in  last  year's  philosophy), 
aerodromes  like  wing-encircled  pigeon-houses,  ships 
of  enormous  length,  rising,  like  Mulciber's  palace, 
to  the  reverberating  music  of  a  thousand  ham- 
mers and  drills ;  when  I  went  on  the  gray,  silent 
cruisers,  miracles  of  human  ingenuity,  crouching 
in  coast  harbors,  each  with  its  sea-plane  like  a 
dragon-fly  above  the  prow;  and  saw  the  trawlers, 
the  chasers,  the  submarines,  the  destroyers,  little 
and  big,  that,  born  of  this  vast  energy,  could  sweep 
and  harry  the  sea  for  thousands  of  miles,  why, 
then  I  was  driven  back  upon  the  cynical  thought 
that  must  come  again  and  again  to  every  one  who 
saw  the  activities  of  Great  Britain  doubled  in  aid 
of  death.  Can  England,  which  the  Germans 
thought  decadent,  and  we  effete,  renew  its  youth 
only  to  destroy? 

No,  there  is  more  than  galvanic  activity  in  this 
new  energy  of  Great  Britain.  It  will  last  after 
the  war,  because  it  is  inspired  by  something  more 
than  self-preservation.  It  springs  from  sources 
too  little  explored  in  our  old  industrial  system, 
from  the  innate,  perhaps  the  inherited,  desire  of 
the  gregarious  animal  to  work  for  larger  issues 
than  his  own  food  and  his  master's  pocket-book. 
As  a  girl  in  a  munition  plant  waited  for  the  frame 
to  bring  the  next  shell  to  her  tool,  I  asked : 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  41 

"  Do  you  like  the  work?  Are  you  happy 
here?  " 

She  answered  as  she  caught  and  turned  the 
shell: 

"  Of  course.  I  get  good  wages.  And  then  IVe 
got  a  boy  in  France.  I  make  the  shells.  He 
shoots  them." 

Humanitarians  may  object  to  this  story,  but 
the  principle  is  sound.  Millions  in  England  and 
America  have  been  working  with  a  consciousness 
that  they  were  earning  more  than  their  wages,  and 
that  the  surplus  was  going  not  to  stockholders  or 
employers,  but  for  the  common  welfare  of  all.  It 
is  ironical,  if  not  pathetic,  that  war,  the  greatest 
destroyer  of  goods,  was  necessary  in  order  to  es- 
tablish in  effective  practice  a  truth  we  have  long 
known,  but  neglected. 

This  generous,  light-hearted,  independent  en- 
deavor is  not  a  purely  British  virtue,  as  I  well 
know ;  but  it  has  had,  I  think,  its  first  and  best  re- 
lease there.  It  has  been  safeguarded  by  a  labor 
policy  that  Americans  have  criticized  with  little 
knowledge  of  the  facts ;  and  though  sprung  from 
conflict,  it  is  not,  as  in  Germany,  tied  fast  to  a 
state  that  protects  and  encourages  its  subjects 
only  that  they  may  be  more  fit  for  war.  If  the 
words  of  great  employers  can  be  trusted,  and  the 
plans  of  the  reconstructionists  and  the  desires  of 


42  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

powerful  labor  leaders,  this  old-new  discovery  will 
not  be  forgotten  with  the  coming  of  peace,  and  the 
new  and  better-directed  British  energy  will  remain. 

Here,  then,  are  three  dominant  traits  of  the  new 
England.  The  first  an  American  must  admire, 
for  his  ancestors  possessed  it,  and  he  hopes  that  he 
still  retains  it.  The  second  warms  his  heart,  as  its 
absence  would  have  chilled  him.  The  third  he  wel- 
comes as  his  own  best-admired  virtue.  And  all 
three  should  make  it  easier  for  us  to  like  and  un- 
derstand Great  Britain  as  the  war  has  molded  it. 
But  the  crisis  is  too  grave,  the  corner  we  are  turn- 
ing in  the  world's  history  too  sharp,  to  rest  hopes 
for  the  future  upon  manifestations  of  character, 
no  matter  how  significant  they  may  be  for  the 
better  understanding  of  two  great  peoples.  In- 
deed, that  these  British  qualities  stir  a  response  in 
us  might  mean  little  for  our  relationship  if  it  were 
not  for  another  factor  of  the  highest  political  im- 
portance. The  Germans  lack  neither  energy  nor 
determination,  and  they  with  Austria  now  aspire 
toward  humihty ;  but  no  upspringing  love  is 
thereby  engendered  in  our  breasts.  It  is  different 
with  the  British,  for  with  them  and  with  the  races 
they  have  fathered  we  are  essentially  like-minded. 
This  is  a  kinship  much  truer  than  the  highly  wa- 
tered Anglo-Saxonism  that  is  supposed  to  unite  us. 

I  do  not  of  course  mean  anything  so  improbable 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  43 

as  an  identity  of  feeling.  No  one  expects  pre- 
cisely the  same  reactions  to  ideas  and  experience 
in  a  Hoosier  of  German  descent  and  a  Shropshire 
farmer.  Indeed,  it  is  easy  to  find  whole  sets  of 
conditions,  some  trivial,  some  important,  where 
the  British  and  the  American  will  never  come  to- 
gether. The  English  conception  of  food,  for  ex- 
ample, as  something  to  be  calculated  by  mass  in- 
stead of  by  taste  is  quite  un-American ;  but  let 
that  pass.  Or  again,  an  American  in  Ireland 
finds  that  his  most  violent  urging  against  the  ex- 
tremists can  make  him  no  enemies,  while  the  most 
concessive  Englishman  can  make  no  friends.  This 
is  a  political  factor  to  which  I  shall  return,  but  it 
may  serve  here  as  proof  that  I  am  advancing  no 
argument  for  the  complete  brotherhood  of  the 
English-speaking  races. 

Nor  am  I  insinuating  that  France  and  America 
are  not  in  many  respects  in  extraordinary  agree- 
ment. Their  ideals,  especially  as  regards  the  free- 
dom of  the  mind  and  the  worth  of  the  individual 
man,  are  much  alike,  and  this  is  the  best  guaran- 
tee of  mutual  faith  after  the  war.  Furthermore, 
French  thought  touches  the  American  imagination 
with  curious  ease  and  with  results  most  beneficial. 
But  the  better  one  knows  the  French,  and  appre- 
ciates their  unique  and  highly  self-contained  civili- 
zation, their  tradition  of  the  family,  their  view  of 


44  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

how  to  live,  the  clearer  it  is  that  the  French  and 
ourselves  will  remain  the  best  of  friends  and  ad- 
mirers without  being  like-minded.  As  a  now  fa- 
mous American  said  recently,  to  learn  to  know  the 
real  France  is  to  admire  as  a  woman  of  thirty  the 
girl  you  loved  from  a  distance  in  youth. 

With  the  English-speaking  races  — Americans, 
Canadians,  Australians,  New  Zealanders,  Irish, 
English,  Scotch,  and  Welsh  —  the  story  is  a  dif- 
ferent one.  It  was  borne  .in  upon  me  first  by  the 
sight  of  Australian  soldiers  on  leave  in  London. 
Fine,  bronzed  fellows,  with  clear  eyes  and  a  reck- 
less swing  to  their  limbs,  they  so  absolutely  placed 
themselves  as  recruits  from  our  Rocky  Mountain 
States  that  their  unexpected  accent  was  always 
a  shock.  Blood  relationship?  No,  blood  rela- 
tionship evidently  had  little  to  do  with  it ;  for  the 
Westerners  with  whom  I  identified  them  might  be 
named  Blankenberg  or  Fitzenheimer.  It  was  like 
conditions  that  had  produced  like  results,  and  the 
likeness  had  extended  to  more  than  broad  spaces,  a 
free  life,  and  a  new  world  in  the  making. 

I  wish  we  had  a  term  for  the  variety  of  world 
civilization  that  has  extended  itself  over  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking countries,  and  deeply  affected  many 
where  English  is  only  a  lingua  franca.  It  is  Brit- 
ish in  origin,  of  course ;  but  to  tell  an  Irishman  or 
a  Grerman- American  that  his  culture  is  British  does 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  45 

not  further  world  peace.  Nor  is  it  true,  for  the 
like-mindedness  I  am  trying  to  describe  long  since 
passed  from  British  control.  To  call  it  an  Anglo- 
Saxon  culture  is  equally  unfortunate.  If  it 
were,  then  only  Anglo-Saxons  would  be  like- 
minded;  whereas  the  bond  of  which  I  write  links 
the  Anglo-Danish-Norman-Celtic  Englishman  and 
the  Anglo  -  French  -  Dutch  -  German  -  Celtic  "  old 
American  "  with  the  pure  German  or  the  pure 
Italian  of  the  second  generation  in  America. 

If  we  break  free  from  some  of  the  nonsense 
about  races  and  look  at  the  facts  in  our  own  coun- 
try, the  thing  becomes  clearer.  Here  are  a  dozen 
or  more  races  in  the  slow  progress  of  amalgama- 
tion, all  living  in  the  same  environment,  all 
studying  (and  this  is  enormously  important)  the 
same  text-book  (your  text-book  is  your  great  lev- 
eler),  all  subject  to  the  same  general  ideals  of  what 
life  is  for,  what  success  means,  how  a  country 
should  be  governed,  how  a  man  should  treat  his  wife 
and  bring  up  his  children.  It  is  absurd  to  suppose 
that  this  makes  them  aU  into  Americans  of  the  t3rpe 
we  developed  before  the  Civil  War.  No,  the  ideals, 
the  text-books,  the  very  character  of  the  nation, 
are  all  altering  in  response  to  the  new  blood.  But 
the  change  is  in  degree,  not  in  kind.  The  essential 
qualities  of  the  English-speaking  culture  (if  I 
must  use  a  term)  with  which  we  began,  remain  the 


46  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

same,  though  lightened  by  the  French  and  Italians, 
given  humor  by  the  Irish,  and  tolerance  by  the 
Jews.  And  this  in  a  lesser  degree  has  happened  in 
Canada  and  Australia,  while  New  Zealand,  the 
youngest  offshoot,  proves  how  far  the  original 
stock  may  vary  without  infusion  of  alien  blood. 
I  venture  to  assert  that  the  son  of  an  Italian, 
having  graduated  from  an  American  high  school, 
can  better  understand  the  ideas  of  a  Manchester 
boy  of  the  same  age,  despite  vast  differences  in 
temperament,  than  the  point  of  view  of  an  eight- 
een-year-old Neapolitan,  even  if,  as  is  by  no  means 
certain,  he  can  talk  to  him  in  Italian.  I  know  that 
this  war  has  brought  a  revelation  to  many  Amer- 
icans abroad.  They  have  found  it  difficult  to  re- 
member that  the  Canadians  are  not  fellow-coun- 
trymen. They  have  found  that  the  native  Brit- 
isher of  every  class  who  at  first,  in  his  restraint 
or  in  his  mannerisms,  burlesqued  on  our  stage  time 
out  of  mind,  has  seemed  to  belong  to  another  world, 
is  after  a  little  acquaintance  curiously  familiar. 
The  differences  that  once  irritated  become  a  source 
of  pleasure.  There  is  a  breakdown  of  alien  feel- 
ing, so  that  your  very  accents  become  passports 
to  good  understanding.  A  fellowship  is  estab- 
lished that  comes  from  looking  differently  and 
talking  differently  and  thinking  just  about  the 
same.     **  Yoii  Americans  and  hus  ought  to  'ave 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  47 

been  in  it  before  together,  Ah  sy,"  says  my  table 
mate  at  "  The  Fish  and  Anchor."  It  was  not  an 
appeal ;  it  was  a  testimonial. 

Again,  I  talked  recently  of  a  possible  league  of 
nations  with  a  man  responsible  in  no  small  meas- 
ure for  Great  Britain's  policies.  The  French  and 
Italians,  he  said,  regard  the  League  of  Nations  as 
an  idea  belonging  particularly  to  the  British  Em- 
pire and  to  America.  They  would  gladly  join  in 
a  new  world  order,  once  it  became  effective,  but  the 
hope  of  it,  and  the  desire  to  realize  it  at  all  costs, 
appertain  to  an  order  of  thinking  and  experience 
different  from  their  hard  training  in  nationalism. 

Or  still  again,  the  special  brand  of  moral  in- 
dignation aroused  in  the  English-speaking  world 
by  German  aggression  is  quite  different  from  the 
perhaps  clearer-sighted  self-defense  of  the  French. 
No  reader  of  French  books  of  the  last  three  years 
can  have  failed  to  observe  how  fundamental  is  the 
belief  of  France  that  she  was  defending  a  unique 
civilization  which  was  to  liberalize,  not  subdue,  the 
world.  Her  endeavor  was  beyond  praise,  but  it 
differed,  nevertheless,  in  character,  if  not  in  ob- 
ject, from  our  binding  passion  for  a  "  square 
deal  "  and  the  rights  of  nations  to  follow  their 
destinies.  In  this,  English  speakers  everywhere 
were  like-minded;  so  much  so  that  the  German- 
American,  who  has  no  love  for  England  and  owes 


48  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

her  nothing  except  through  the  common  American 
inheritance,  nevertheless  opposed  himself  whole- 
heartedly to  men  of  his  own  blood  whose  minds  in 
matters  of  war  and  politics  had  become  different 
from  his  own. 

If,  then,  we  speakers  of  English  of  all  races  are 
in  a  few  essentials  like-minded,  let  us  unhesitatingly 
apply  this  fact  of  supreme  historical  importance 
to  the  test  of  the  present  and  the  hope  of  the 
future.  How  can  we  realize  those  ideals  of  a  better 
international  order  that  now,  to  most  sane  men, 
are  the  final,  though  not  the  sole,  justification  for 
the  losses  of  the  war?  Only  by  finding  and 
strengthening  that  common  will  which  resides  in 
like-minded  communities,  able  to  feel  and  think  and 
act  together  in  a  common  cause.  In  America  and 
the  British  nations  such  groups  are  dominant.  In 
America  and  the  British  nations,  now  that  France 
and  Italy  have  been  drained  in  mere  self-preserva- 
tion, is  to  be  found  the  surplus  of  power  to  make 
sane  construction  arise  upon  the  ruins  of  destruc- 
tion, and  direct  what  is  still  a  doubtful  conclusion 
toward  ends  profitable  for  the  world. 

I  do  not  for  a  moment  intend  to  imply  that  ideal- 
ism and  a  desire  for  a  cleaner  future  are  confined 
to  the  English-speaking  peoples.  We  have  plenty 
of  allies  here,  even  among  the  enemy.  Russia,  in 
her  fashion,  is  certainly  with  us.     But  the  definite 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  49 

purpose  to  make  a  better  organization  emerge 
from  this  struggle  is,  as  is  natural,  best  felt  by 
America,  the  least  involved  of  the  belligerents  in 
ancient  entanglements.  And  our  ideas  are  best 
understood  by  the  nations  most  like-minded.  Great 
Britain  and  her  Dominions.  In  us  is  a  power  and 
a  will  to  forget  old  ambitions  and  work  in  joint 
leadership,  not,  God  grant  it,  for  an  "  Anglo- 
Saxon  bloc  "  and  a  new  balance  of  power,  but 
rather  toward  a  federation  realizable  for  us  now, 
and  which  France  and  Italy,  in  all  surety,  and 
a  reconstructed  Germany  wiU  be  glad  to  share. 

But  we  must  first  prove  our  ability  to  federate 
ourselves.  Perhaps  no  man  alive  has  had  more 
experience  with  national  federation  than  Lord  Mil- 
ner.  Here  is  his  opinion  as  he  gave  it  to  me  in  a 
conversation  which  touched  upon  the  subject  of 
which  I  am  writing: 

"  Americans  are  like  us,  and  we  ought  to  work 
well  together.  The  present  situation  proves  that 
we  must  work  together.  The  League  of  Nations 
is  right  enough,  but  there  is  one  league  in  existence 
now,  the  British  Empire.  I  say  to  our  interna- 
tionalists, *  You  talk  of  all  the  world  sitting  down 
at  one  table,  and  here  is  a  league  in  working  order 
that  you  don't  give  a  hang  for.'  And  now  Amer- 
ica must  stick  with  us.  I  am  called  an  imperialist 
for  talking  so  much  of  the  British  Empire.     Why, 


50  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

what  imperialism  is  there  in  England  and  Austra- 
lia and  Canada?  We  all  do  as  we  please.  There 
should  be  an  understanding  between  America  and 
England  which  would  make  war  as  impossible  as 
between  England  and  Australia.  It  may  be  that 
only  one  system  of  thinking  and  governing  will 
prevail  on  earth;  but  it  is  quite  conceivable  that 
militarism,  or  whatever  you  choose  to  call  the  Ger- 
man method,  may  suit  certain  countries.  In  any 
case,  at  present  and  perhaps  for  some  time  to 
come  (the  war  was  not  over  when  he  spoke),  it  is 
likely  to  prevail  there.  Eventually  our  ideal  will 
win,  must  win;  but  not  unless  we  who  believe  in  it 
can  learn  how  to  hold  together."  It  would  be  well 
if  we  Americans  gave  more  thought  to  the  oppor- 
tunities already  at  hand  in  the  English-speaking 
world  for  beginning  world  federation. 

The  risks  attending  the  association  of  so  many 
like-minded  countries  are  of  course  evident.  I  see 
the  danger  of  attempting  to  impose  Anglo-Amer- 
ican "  democracy  "  upon  nations  that  rightly  pre- 
fer another  kind;  the  danger  of  a  new  and  gigan- 
tic imperialism;  the  danger  of  frightening  the 
world  into  some  vast  opposing  coalition.  But  it 
is  certain  that  American  leadership,  like  American 
common  sense,  is  committed  to  a  policy  in  sharp- 
est conflict  with  such  recurrences  of  ancient  error. 
And  no  observer  in  England  can  doubt  that  the 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  51 

majority  sentiment  in  Great  Britain  is  with  us  in 
this  respect,  bound  to  us  by  self-interest  as  well 
as  by  sympathy  and  a  common  desire.  We  must 
strike  out  boldly  and  truly  on  these  lines  or  pre- 
pare for  heavy  failure.  The  alternative  is  world 
disorganization. 

If,  however,  salvation  is  to  be  sought  through 
the  like-mindedness  of  our  peoples,  then  it  is  not 
formal  engagements,  but  the  concurrence  of  dumb 
desires  which  in  the  long  run  will  hold  them  to- 
gether. And  an  American,  speaking  for  his  own 
nation,  should  not  be  afraid  to  write  down  the 
difficulties  in  the  path. 

There  are,  for  example,  the  American  preju- 
dices against  Great  Britain,  and  particularly 
against  England,  which  common  aims  and  better 
knowledge  may  overlay,  but  will  not  of  themselves 
remove.  Some  of  these  prejudices  are  merely  sen- 
timental, as  is  some  of  our  affection  for  France; 
some  of  them  are  honestly  based  and  must  be  hon- 
estly encountered.  They  are  the  more  serious 
because  England  for  years  to  come  will  be  our 
point  of  contact  with  the  politics  of  the  British 
Empire. 

Most  intense  is  the  Irish  distrust  of  everything 
English  that  spreads  down  through  the  second  and 
third  generation  of  Irish-Americans.  The  Irish 
and  the  English,  in  fact,  are  the  least  like-minded 


52  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

of  all  the  English-speaking  nations.  But  Ireland 
is  as  pro-American  as  she  is  anti-English,  and  the 
Irish-American  has  become  more  like-minded  with 
the  British  than  his  grandfather  would  have  be- 
lieved possible.  America  has  the  power,  if  she  has 
the  will,  to  explain  Ireland  to  England  and  Eng- 
land to  Ireland;  and  they  sorely  need  it.  Hope, 
then,  balances  fear  in  this  direction. 

Less  passionate,  but  more  deep-seated,  is  the 
passive  resistance  of  our  non-British  races  — 
Jews,  Germans,  Italians,  Slavs,  and  Scandinavians 
—  to  common  action  with  an  empire  the  traditions 
of  which  are  sharply  different  from  their  own.  If 
our  purpose  were  to  Anglicize  America,  this  diffi- 
culty might  well  be  insuperable.  But  no  such  na- 
tional suicide  is  contemplated.  These  races,  alien 
only  as  the  Dutch,  the  Huguenots,  and  the  Low 
Germans  were  alien  to  the  English  of  our  colonies, 
have  accepted  our  English-speaking  civilization, 
have  modified  and  improved  itj  making  it  more 
flexible  and,  I  hope  and  believe,  more  fruitful  than 
the  parent  stock.  In  entering  the  English-speak- 
ing bond  they  have  increased,  not  lessened,  the 
opportunity  for  international  like-raindedness. 

Our  schools  have  been  a  chief  factor  in  this  de- 
velopment. But  they  have  succeeded  because  it 
was  written  down  that  they  should  succeed,  not 
with  the  conscious  purpose  which  must  now  be 


BLOOD  AND  WATER  53 

grasped.  How  fantastically  wrong  is  the  history 
of  the  American  Revolution  which  most  of  us  stud- 
ied in  youth,  wherein  George  III  appears  as  the 
type  of  the  England  of  his  day,  and  Burke  is  a 
voice  cr3'ing  in  a  wilderness !  If  patriotism  could 
be  stirred  only  by  misrepresenting  the  foreigner, 
then  this  last  and  most  stupid  breeding  of  preju- 
dice would  be  at  least  understandable.  But  we 
must  be  rid  of  it. 

These  are  real  difficulties.  Let  us  not  add  to 
them  by  building  upon  false  hopes.  I  do  not  be- 
long to  that  group  of  optimists  who  think  that 
combats  together  on  a  bloody  field  for  a  common 
cause  insure  for  all  time  the  fellowship  of  nations. 
Such  is  not  the  lesson  of  history.  Soldiers  have 
fought  side  by  side  one  year  and  face  to  face  the 
next  too  often  to  build  upon  that  shallow  belief. 
In  the  confusion  of  the  next  decade  it  is  all  too 
probable  that  the  material  interests  of  the  English- 
speaking  peoples  may  conflict  on  issues  which  in 
the  past  have  made  wars.  It  is  folly  to  expect 
agreement  because  we  have  fought  against  a  com- 
mon enemy.  It  is  good  sense  to  strive  and  hope 
for  agreement  because  of  our  hundred  years'  his- 
tory of  peace,  because  now  as  never  before  we  re- 
act alike  to  the  great  impulse  of  this  epoch,  like 
each  other  when  we  meet,  and  have  a  common  lan- 
guage of  the  mind  as  well  as  of  the  tongue.     But 


54  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

it  will  never  be  easy,  as  the  orator  would  have  us 
believe,  for  the  most  like-minded  of  nations  to  re- 
main inseparable. 

And  yet  at  the  last  I  must  inscribe  myself  opti- 
mist ;  for  optimism  just  now  is  the  function  of 
America.  Western  Europe  is  worn  and  weary  and 
a  little  cynical.  Europe  seeks  rest,  regardless  of 
what  may  come  after.  We  of  the  farther  West, 
with  our  naive  enthusiasm  and  our  unsapped  en- 
ergy, must  supply  the  impulse  toward  large  issues. 
Help  in  the  battles  of  the  past  we  offered  to  the 
Allies.  Escape  from  the  perils  of  the  future  may 
come  if  we  learn  to  see  eye  by  eye  with  Britons, 
Canadians,  Australians,  as  our  Poles  and  Italians 
and  Germans  have  learned  to  see  eye  by  eye  with 
us  at  home.     Let  us  set  no  bounds  to  our  hope. 


Ill 

ON    IRISH    LITERATURE 

Ireland's  best  case  is  to  be  found  in  her  liter- 
ature; and  if  she  were  to  be  represented,  as  the 
aggrieved  one,  in  the  congress  of  English-speaking 
countries,  I  would  have  her  represented  by  a  book. 
I  do  not  mean  a  book  on  the  "  Irish  question  "  — 
that  would  be  enough  to  disrupt  any  conference! 
I  mean  a  group  of  lyrics  by  Yeats,  or  selections 
from  the  prose  of  George  Russell  or  Standish 
O'Grady,  or  best  of  all  by  far,  a  play  by  Synge  — 
and  the  less  politics  and  Celtic  twilight  in  it  the 
better. 

There  are  a  thousand  things,  economic,  com- 
mercial, religious,  geographical,  prejudicial,  irri- 
table, and  disreputable  that  count  for  Ireland,  but 
only  one  which  has  breathing,  human  interest  for 
an  Australian  or  an  American  —  and  that  is  not 
the  body,  but  the  soul  of  Ireland.  He  will  not 
admit  it  perhaps,  or  be  conscious  of  it,  for  we  do 
not  talk  of  souls  in  America  (and  I  suppose  Aus- 
tralia) except  on  Sundays  and  in  sermons.  He 
might  be  shocked  to  be  told  that  even  the  easy  Irish 
humor  that  made  a  background  for  him  in  boyhood 
has  something  to  do  with  soul. 

It  has;  and  it  is  just  one  among  many  Irish 
forms  of  escape,  escape  from  the  rather  tiresome 

55 


56  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

efficiencies ;  escape  from  a  cut-and-dried  economic 
and  respectable  view  of  the  universe;  escape  from 
ugliness  of  the  body  into  beauty  of  the  mind.  I 
do  not  mean  an  escape  to  Angus  and  Dana  and  the 
other  Celtic  gods  who  seem  to  be  local  celebrities 
after  all,  a  bit  overwritten  in  a  publicity  campaign 
to  put  them  beside  the  old  favorites  of  classic  Eng- 
lish literature  (a  form  of  Bolshevikism  this,  an 
attack  by  the  Irish  proletariat  upon  the  vested 
interests  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  deities).  They 
have  their  place,  but  it  is  the  persistent  and  suc- 
cessful escape  of  the  Irish  mind  into  sorrow  and 
joy  and  reverence  and  love,  irrespective  of  binding 
circumstance  ( Synge's  "  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World  "  is  an  example)  that  engages  the  world. 
For  it  is  getting  harder,  this  escape,  for  us  all,  in 
measure  as  life  becomes  standardized  and  our  emo- 
tions are  educated  into  a  norm  of  mediocrity.  We 
welcome  a  rebel  who  fights  for  a  warm,  illogical, 
interesting  idealism.  And  such  a  rebel  is  Ireland. 
We  share  her  discontent,  while  condemning  her 
discontented  who  possess  our  civilization  without 
being  able  comfortably  to  live  within  it.  We  our- 
selves are  illogical  in  such  an  attitude;  and  there- 
fore probably  are  right.  We  love  Ireland  because 
she  speaks  for  the  rebel  in  all  of  us :  we  wish  to 
see  her  "  pacified  "  because  we  have  found  no  way 
by  which  rebellion  against  the  ugliness  of  our  mod- 
ern world  can  be  reconciled  with  our  daily  task 
of  making  it  more  efficient.     But  is  there  a  way? 


THE   IRISH  MIND 

I  was  a  plain  American,  interested,  but  a  little 
naive,  when  I  entered  Ireland  in  the  spring  of  1918. 
I  believed  then,  like  most  Americans,  that  Ireland 
should  have  come  wholeheartedly  into  the  war ;  and 
I  think  so  still,  except  that  I  know  now  that  Ire- 
land will  have  suffered  most  because  she  stayed 
lukewarm.  I  believed,  like  most  Americans,  that 
Home  Rule  was  a  good  thing  and  should  be  put 
through ;  and  I  still  so  believe,  but  see  the  complex- 
ity of  the  problem.  I  was  a  little  weary,  as  are 
most  Americans,  of  the  endless  fuss  over  Ireland 
while  the  world  was  burning;  but  now  I  realize 
that,  however  insignificant  in  a  universal  conflict 
may  seem  the  Irish  political  squabble,  the  mind  of 
Ireland  is  important,  is  significant  for  us  and  the 
future,  and  is  deeply  misunderstood  by  general 
friend  and  general  foe  in  America. 

I  hear  in  the  clubs,  "  Who  is  interested  in  Ire- 
land? "  and  I  wish  to  answer,  "  Millions  of  Irish- 
men in  America  and  Canada  and  Australia,  and  in 
our  armies  in  France,  who  are  storing  up  confusion 
and  bitterness."     The  question  was  a  foolish  one. 

57 


58  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

I  hear,  "  What  difference  does  it  make  what  hap- 
pens to  Ireland?  "  and  my  answer  is,  "  Will  it  make 
no  difference  for  the  future  if  in  Ireland  demo- 
cratic government  scores  a  conspicuous  failure?  " 

It  was  my  privilege  to  see  in  London  the  library 
of  German  propaganda  printed  for  neutral  coun- 
tries and  captured  in  the  course  of  the  war.  Half 
of  it  treated  of  race-problems,  and  of  that  half, 
two-thirds  was  on  Ireland.  Do  we  still  sneer,  as 
in  1914,  at  German  propaganda? 

I  entered  Ireland  by  the  green  hills  of  Ulster, 
and  moved  freely  through  County  Antrim  and 
Belfast.  I  talked  there  with  bishops  and  deans 
of  the  Church  of  Ireland,  and  fine  upstanding 
generals  and  county  families  in  their  walled  gar- 
dens —  friendly  people,  solid,  simple,  more  vol- 
uble than  the  Scotch,  but  with  hard-gripping 
minds  like  theirs,  that  took  one  thing  at  a 
time  and  wrung  it.  They  had  worked  for  their 
comfort,  made  prosperous  land  out  of  a  waste  of 
whin  and  gorse  and  would  keep  it  against  Prussian 
or  Sinn  Feiner  —  that  was  my  impression.  Spec- 
ulation upon  world-politics  did  not  interest  them ; 
they  knew  little  of  the  new  England,  less  of  Amer- 
ica; the  war  was  the  war,  and  they  intended  to 
fight  it  out  —  that  was  all  there  was  to  that  sub- 
ject. They  were  a  perfect  type  of  the  genus 
Tory,  with  his  limitations,  and  especially  with  his 


THE  miSH  MIND  59 

virtues  of  self-reliance,  self-respect,  and  the  stead- 
iness which  comes  from  caste. 

I  talked  with  bankers  and  manufacturers  and 
gardeners  and  cabbies  —  Presbyterians  this  group 
and  representing  the  Orange  wing  of  the  Ulster 
party,  but,  like  the  others,  proud  of  Belfast  and 
of  the  relative  prosperity  of  the  North  of  Ireland. 
Belfast  is  a  black  city,  a  depressing  city,  full  of 
overdriven  faces,  but  full  of  energy,  too,  and  the 
signs  of  success.  Here  it  was  religion  one  heard 
about,  and  the  dangers  of  Roman  Catholic  domi- 
nation ;  it  was  customs  and  excises  and  the  fear  of 
a  lazy  South  battening  upon  Northern  taxes  that 
they  talked  of;  it  was  the  shiftless  Celt,  who  still 
gets  his  water  from  rain-barrels  and  yet  thinks  he 
can  run  the  country ;  the  Pope  and  the  £42,000  he 
draws  annually  from  Ireland,  "  And  how  much 
would  he  be  getting  under  Home  Rule?  "  And  I 
formed,  I  think,  a  just  idea  of  the  "  case  "  of  the 
North  —  her  right  to  safeguard  her  economic 
prosperity,  the  honest  fear  of  a  vote  controlled  by 
the  church,  her  unwillingness  to  let  slack,  spend- 
thrift Dublin  run  neat,  orderly  Belfast.  But  I 
left,  wondering  why  these  sturdy  Scotch-Irish  folk 
were  so  timorous.  Why,  unlike  their  ancestors  in 
the  colonies,  they  dared  not  run  risks  in  order  to 
gain  the  benefits  of  a  united  island;  why  these 
buUders  of  ships  and  weavers  of  linen,  who  alone 


60  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

had  made  commerce  and  local  government  success- 
ful in  Ireland,  were  so  resolute  to  cling  to  Eng- 
land's skirts,  even  at  the  cost  of  perpetuating  Irish 
division  and  rancor  among  their  own  minorities ;  so 
afraid  to  venture  union  with  a  people  whose  prac- 
tical efficiency  they  despised.  For  while  all  in  the 
North  argued  their  right  to  stay  in  the  Union,  no 
one  supposed  that  this  would  satisfy  anyone  in 
Ireland  but  themselves  and  a  few  Unionists  of  the 
South. 

Later  I  traveled  south  through  the  meadows  of 
County  Down  and  past  those  dim  beautiful  moun- 
tains of  Mourne,  in  a  country  so  rich  and  so  peace- 
ful that  one  covdd  not  but  reflect  uneasily  upon  the 
men  who  kept  it  in  turmoil.  My  compartment  was 
full  of  officers  of  the  British  army  of  occupation ; 
in  the  villages  I  saw  children  half  naked  and  wholly 
dirty ;  on  a  platform  was  chalked,  "  Down  with 
Home  Rule,"  and  **  Fight  for  every  country  ex- 
cept your  own."  And  so  I  came  to  beautiful, 
disheveled  Dublin,  a  city  of  the  soul,  with  dirty 
finger-nails  and  a  torn  dress  and  a  nasty  temper 
and  a  voice  of  the  angels. 

While  I  lived  in  Dublin  I  saw  much  of  Nation- 
alists and  those  intenser  Nationalists  who,  in 
all  but  republicanism,  are  really  Sinn  Feiners. 
I  talked  with  friends  of  George  Moore  and 
the    Celtic    twilight,    who    loved    me    because    I 


THE  IRISH  MIND  61 

was  an  American,  and  insulted  me  in  the 
hope  of  surprising  an  admission  that  America 
came  into  the  war  "  bought  by  English  gold."  I 
talked  with  M  in  his  workroom  frescoed  with  Cel- 
tic gods,  where  he  strides  from  his  mountainous 
desk  of  pamphlets  to  paint  in  an  Irish  scene,  then 
turns  back  to  economics,  or  pure  milk,  or  poetry. 
A  black-bearded  man  with  burning  eyes  and  a  voice 
that  chants,  he  gave  me  my  first  idea  of  the  in- 
tensity of  life  in  Ireland. 

I  talked  with  poets  consuming  in  an  hour  a 
week's  rations  of  emotion.  I  talked  with  John 
MacNeil,  ascetic,  intellectual  leader  of  the  Sinn 
Fein  party,  whose  judgment  kept  the  Easter  re- 
bellion from  becoming  a  national  disaster;  who 
thought  clean  and  cool  on  all  points  except  the  re- 
lations between  England  and  Ireland.  I  talked 
with  radical  priests ;  with  Unionists  in  government 
service,  who,  after  a  second  glass  of  port,  became 
equally  Irish  and  almost  as  radical ;  with  scholars, 
business  men,  women,  intellectuals ;  and  began  to 
see  that  nationalism  in  Ireland  (I  mean  the  emo- 
tion, not  the  party)  was  a  religion;  was  a  passion 
so  strong  that  arguments  which  ignored  it  for 
questions  of  efficiency  or  profit  were  untrust- 
worthy. 

I  met,  too,  the  wilder  Sinn  Feiners,  in  assemblies 
which  began  at  indefinite  hours  and  lasted  indefi- 


62  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

nitely.  There  were  labor  leaders  present,  whose 
sense  of  Ireland's  international  responsibilities 
was  struggling  with  distrust  of  what  they  thought 
was  an  "  Enghsh  war."  No  one  in  a  press  cen- 
sored with  more  vigor  than  intelligence  had  ex- 
plained to  them  why  it  was  also  America's.  There 
were  destructive  radicals,  who  added  to  Ireland's 
hereditary  grievances  all  grievances  that  the  sup- 
posedly downtrodden  have  voiced  anywhere,  and 
slid  from  Bolshevikism  into  Nationalism,  and  from 
Nationalism  into  pacifism,  with  easy  inconsistency 
accompanied  by  vituperation.  There  were  fanatic 
women  who  kept  their  watches  an  hour  and  twenty- 
five  minutes  behind  the  ofiicial  time,  because  "  sum- 
mer time  "  was  an  English  invention  and  real  Irish 
time  ought  to  be  twenty-five  minutes  slower  still. 
There  were  melancholy  idealists,  pure  of  motives, 
noble  of  heart,  drunk  with  vision  and  with  wrath ; 
and  truculent  chaps  with  angry  eyes  and  a  general 
expression  of  having  been  kept  too  long  out  of  a 
fight.  To  them  all  I  talked  America  and  American 
ideals  in  the  war,  not  hesitating  to  express  views 
in  sharpest  conflict  with  their  own;  and  I  was 
sometimes  agreed  with,  usually  understood,  always 
listened  to  tolerantly.  (Except  for  an  excited 
poetess,  who  challenged  me  because  in  our  own 
Civil  War  we  had  thrown  the  tea  into  Boston  har- 
bor while  now  we  were  tied  to  the  apron-strings  of 


THE  IRISH  MIND  63 

Britain!)  For  as  the  Irishman  once  looked  to 
Spain  and  then  to  France,  so  now  he  looks  to 
America  for  sympathy.  And  I  came  away  con- 
vinced that  the  so-called  Pro-Germanism  of  Sinn 
Fein  (a  very  few  individuals  excepted)  was  like 
much  of  their  extremist  politics,  mere  froth  and 
spume  floating  up  from  a  troubled  mind  out  of 
joint  with  the  times  and  mishandled  by  those  in 
authority,  signifying  rebellion  against  circum- 
stance but  no  treason.  And  with  this  conclusion 
I  find  the  calmer  sense  of  England  agrees. 

Afterwards  I  saw  much  of  Sir  Horace  Plunkett 
and  the  Moderates  of  the  South,  in  the  exciting 
days  when  the  Convention  was  closing,  and  just 
before  conscription,  at  the  moment  of  expected 
preliminary  settlement,  struck  Dublin  into  a  mute 
rage  in  which  fear  and  indignation  had  equal 
parts ;  the  time  when  the  extremists  of  either  party 
were  seeking  walls  against  which  to  set  their  backs. 

It  was  easy  to  admire  the  system  of  agricultural 
cooperation,  founded  by  Sir  Horace,  which  is  mak- 
ing rural  Ireland  comfortable ;  easy  to  sympathize 
with  the  belief  of  many  Moderates,  both  Catholic 
and  Protestant,  that  poverty  and  waste  and  alco^ 
hoi  are  more  dangerous  to  Ireland  than  England, 
or  Orange  Ulster,  or  radical  Sinn  Fein.  The 
imagination  warmed  to  a  program,  not  exclu- 
sively political,  which  would  make  of  Ireland,  not 


64  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

a  second-class  England,  but  a  civilization  based, 
like  Denmark's,  upon  scientific  agriculture,  free 
as  might  be  from  the  evils  of  industrialism,  yet  suc- 
cessful and  populous.  I  remembered  that  Ireland 
had  halved  her  population  in  the  past  while  Great 
Britain  had  been  doubling  hers.  I  considered  that 
the  years  between  1914  and  1918  have  not  demon- 
strated the  surpassing  value  of  a  civilization 
molded  by  industrial  countries  where  the  normal 
life  is  of  the  factory  or  the  sweat-shop;  and  I 
wondered  why  such  a  program  seemed  so  little 
to  interest  political  Irishmen;  why  we  heard  so 
little  of  it  in  America.  It  was  like  a  cool  draft 
after  the  chill  of  Ulster  commercialism,  the  vapor- 
ous heat  of  Sinn  Fein  ideology ;  but  it  was  clearly 
not  the  accepted  potion  for  Ireland's  ills  —  yet. 

Night  after  night  I  talked  half  the  night 
through  in  Ireland,  and  I  was  showered  with  doc- 
uments from  every  party  —  books,  leaflets,  letters, 
statistics,  reports,  chppings,  economic  solutions, 
religious  solutions,  political  solutions,  complaints, 
until,  as  I  looked  over  my  desk,  all  Ireland  seemed 
to  be  shouting  in  print,  "  This  is  what  I  want ;  this 
is  what  will  cure  me  " ;  and  no  two  voices  cried 
alike. 

Later,  in  England,  the  complexity  of  the  prob- 
lem was  only  increased ;  for  England  realizes,  as 
America  seemingly  does  not,  that  Ireland  cannot 


THE  IRISH  MIND  65 

go  on  as  she  is  without  clogging  the  wheels  of  in- 
ternational progress ;  and  there  is  no  man  in  any 
party  who  does  not  have  his  bitter  opinion  as  to 
what  thing  is  best  to  do.  And  of  course  I  formed 
my  own  opinion  which,  unimportant  though  it  is, 
I  shall  probably  be  unable  to  keep  out  of  this  es- 
say. But  more  important  than  any  opinion  seemed 
the  conviction  borne  in  upon  me  that  all  things  I 
had  seen  and  heard  were  symptoms  of  some  inner 
malady.  That,  at  least  for  us  Americans,  it  was 
better  to  sweep  away  all  statistics  and  documen- 
tary solutions,  discourage  the  pamphleteer  and  the 
writer  of  letters  to  the  press,  and  try  to  under- 
stand the  Irish  before  we  took  a  hand  in  the  uni- 
versal game  of  solving  the  Irish  question  on  paper. 
And  I  found  myself  equally  convinced  that  the 
humblest  attempt  was  worth  while,  not  only  be- 
cause the  steady  earnestness  of  Ulsterism  and  the 
invigorating  Nationalism  of  Sinn  Fein  are  the  best 
fruits  of  Ireland,  but  also  because  these  lovable, 
vivid  Irish  have  disappointed  us  in  the  war,  be- 
cause they  puzzle  and  irritate  us,  because  it  will 
be  so  easy  for  us,  as  for  them,  to  make  irrevocable 
mistakes. 

To  begin  then  with  apparent  but  not  real  harsh- 
ness, if  I  may  be  allowed  to  present  my  diagnosis, 
the  atmosphere  of  Ireland  is  psychopathic,  and 
the  Irish,  South  and  North,  and,  what  is  more 


66  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

curious,  the  English  who  are  sent  to  rule  them,  all, 
at  one  time  or  another  and  in  different  fashions, 
manifest  clear  symptoms  of  abnormality.  Ireland 
is  like  those  interesting  abnormal  cases  which  spe- 
cialists have  to  handle,  where  the  patient  is  some- 
times a  genius  and  sometimes  subnormal,  where 
every  trait  that  is  really  characteristic,  good  or 
bad,  is  magnified  until  it  threatens  to  crush  all  the 
others.  There  have  been  many  such  cases  among 
famous  individuals,  —  Poe  was  one,  Nietzsche  was 
another,  —  and  science  seeks  them  out  keenly  be- 
cause by  their  exaggeration  of  traits  common  to 
humanity  they  have  become  large-print  books  in 
which  the  qualities  of  modern  man  can  be  easily 
read.  But  an  abnormal  nation  is  dangerous  to 
itself  and  others  because  it  cannot,  like  a  patient, 
be  kept  under  easy  observation ;  because  it  may  at 
any  moment  carry  through  the  unexpected,  ruin- 
ous act.  Yet,  even  in  partial  derangement,  it  may 
exhibit,  for  the  world  to  read,  virtues  as  well  as 
vices  more  emphatic  than  those  of  less  turbulent 
races. 

The  fanatic  patriotism  of  the  radical  Sinn 
Feiners  is  abnormal.  It  burns  so  intensely  that 
their  judgment  is  affected.  Great  Britain,  in 
spite  of  her  creditable  world-history,  in  spite  of  her 
modern  leadership  in  social  reform,  they  see  only 
through  the  darkening  lens  of  Irish  history.     Ha- 


THE  nUSH  MIND  67 

tred  of  England  is  like  a  hand  before  their  eyes; 
and  the  balked  vision  turns  back  always  upon  the 
woes  of  Ireland.  Their  grievances  are  real  ones, 
—  especially  the  historical  grievances  which  mean 
much  to  Irishmen,  —  but  they  are  magnified.  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett's  epigram,  "  Anglo-Irish  history 
is  for  Ireland  to  forget  and  for  England  to  remem- 
ber," has  been  applied  on  neither  side  of  the  Chan- 
nel. And  their  own  virtues  are  also  magnified  — 
the  strengths  and  the  loyalties  and  the  ideals  of 
their  patriotism.  Ireland  is  fuU  of  men  who  are 
willing  to  die  for  a  principle,  although  they  can- 
not agree  with  each  other  as  to  which  principle  to 
die  for.  *'  I  want  to  fight  in  this  war,"  I  heard  an 
Irish  poet  say ;  *'  I  want  to  be  conscripted ;  but  I 
think  I  ought  to  let  myself  be  shot  for  refusing.  I 
don't  mind  dying,  but  I  should  like  to  die  for  Ire- 
land." Particularistic  patriotism  this  is,  like  the 
patriotism  of  Prussia ;  but  if  it  is  less  practically 
effective,  it  is  also  far  nobler.  Intense  and  fine 
and  also  self -regarding,  it  is  the  patriotism  of  my 
country  right  or  wrong  and  the  devil  take  the  rest 
of  the  world.  In  brief,  it  is  the  patriotism  of  the 
man  who  has  a  genius  for  being  just  patriotic  — 
who  is,  thus  far,  abnormal. 

Ulster,  with  her  determined  "  stand-patism,"  is 
abnormal  in  quite  another  sense.  Is  there  such  a 
thing  as  abnormal  normality?     If  so,  Ulster  has 


68  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

it.  It  is  normal  to  care  for  one's  pocket-book,  to 
distrust  visionaries,  to  prefer  a  low  tax-rate  to 
soap-box  oratory.  Telephone  Belfast,  they  say, 
and  your  business  is  done  in  five  minutes.  Tele- 
phone Cork,  and  it  takes  fifteen.  Telephone  Dub- 
lin, and  they  reply,  "  Ah,  call  again  to-morrow." 
It  is  normal  to  be  proud  of  a  clever,  hard-headed 
community  which  is  as  pleased  with  the  status  quo 
as  most  of  us  were  before  1914.  But  to  be  as 
wholly  and  successfully  Tory  as  the  ruling  class  in 
the  North  of  Ireland  is  abnormal.  The  Bourbons 
were  also  abnormal  in  this  respect,  but  the  Bour- 
bons were  stupid  and  Ulster  is  not.  She  merely 
manifests  a  typical  case  of  being  completely  sat- 
isfied with  the  state  of  life  into  which  it  has  pleased 
God  to  call  one.  All  she  wants  is  to  be  let  alone ; 
1913  (English  Liberals  say  1774)  was  quite  good 
enough  for  her ;  there  would  be  no  desire  for  change 
in  Ireland  if  mischief-makers  would  keep  their 
mouths  shut.  The  war  is  a  good  war;  her  sys- 
tem of  industries  based  upon  cheap  labor  is  a  good 
system ;  the  Protestant  religion  is  a  good  religion ; 
all  is  for  the  best  —  as  the  Deist-Tories  of  the 
eighteenth  century  used  to  say,  —  if  only  Dublin 
and  the  Liberals  and  the  Labor  Party  would  let 
well  enough  alone. 

It  is  not  surprising  that  Ulster  has  been  popu- 
lar with  a  British  government  which  had  to  keep 


THE  IRISH  MIND  69 

the  Empire  going  in  war-time;  but  such  a  warm- 
hearted desire  to  stop  the  clock  is  certainly  ab- 
normal. These  fine,  steady,  self-reliant  Scotch- 
Irish,  full  of  Puritan  dogmatism  and  practical  ef- 
ficiency, are  museum  specimens  exhibiting  in  its 
unmixed  condition  the  conservatism  possible  to 
man.  Indeed,  when  one  breaks  away  from  the 
fold,  he  becomes,  not  a  moderate,  but  a  radical 
Nationalist  like  George  Russell,  or  a  Sinn  Feiner 
like  John  MacNeil,  and  puts  drive  into  the  ideas 
of  the  opposite  party.  Everywhere  in  the  world 
except  in  Ulster  they  are  wondering  what  will  hap- 
pen after  the  war.  Ulster  knows  —  nothing  will 
happen! 

It  cannot  be  denied  also  that,  by  some  curious 
process  of  infection,  the  actions  of  the  British  gov- 
ernment in  Ireland  have  become  abnormal  also  by 
comparison  with  their  procedure  elsewhere.  The 
friends  of  the  government  praise  its  attempts  to 
conciliate  or  its  efforts  to  "  hold  down  "  Ireland, 
according  to  their  views,  but  wonder  at  the  incon- 
sistency of  doing  both  together.  The  enemies  of 
the  government  maintain  that  no  policy  what- 
soever is  to  be  found,  but  only  the  resultant  of 
attempts  to  soothe  the  party  which  at  a  given  time 
is  likely  to  make  the  most  trouble. 

The  truth  is  that  it  is  extremely  difficult  to 
handle  abnormal  conditions  and  keep  your  head. 


70  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

A  wise  Cabinet  proposed  to  accept  the  report  of 
the  Irish  Convention,  and  then,  in  spite  of  imper- 
fections, to  pledge  itself  to  put  through  its  moder- 
ate proposals.  A  perturbed  Cabinet,  on  the  day 
the  report  was  delivered,  announced  immediate 
conscription  in  Ireland,  even  though  knowing  that 
this  would  make  impossible  any  "  Moderate  "  solu- 
tion. A  panicky  Cabinet,  a  little  later,  suspended 
conscription  in  Ireland  in  hopes  that  the  Irish 
would  become  "  Moderates."  This  is  not  normal 
British  policy  or  British  sanity.  I  am,  indeed, 
not  the  first  by  many  to  observe  that  the  Britisher 
in  Ireland,  or  treating  of  Ireland,  loses  his  toler- 
ance, his  patience,  and  sometimes  his  balance,  and 
often  becomes  either  a  despot,  or  a  weakling,  or 
(if  he  stays  long  enough)  a  radical  Sinn  Feiner. 

The  disease,  however,  is  an  Irish  disease,  and 
it  is  in  Ireland  that  it  must  be  cured.  In  Ulster 
it  is  constitutional  and  will  probably  yield  only  to 
operation,  or  atrophy  of  the  obstructing  parts. 
Ulster  is  relatively  happy,  and  rightly  so ;  for,  no 
matter  how  reactionary  in  policy,  she  has  earned 
self-respect.  She  was  useful  in  the  war,  which  is 
certainly  more  than  can  be  said  without  reserva- 
tion of  the  rest  of  Ireland.  She  is  making  money. 
And  furthermore,  her  excessive  desire  to  let  the 
future  take  care  of  itself  is  less  punished  in  this 
world  than  any  other  abnormality.     Except    in 


THE  IRISH  MIND  71 

times  of  revolution  or  rapid  change,  it  runs  with 
the  wheels  of  ordinary  living,  and  often  directs 
them. 

But  the  malady  in  Southern  Ireland  is  more  dan- 
gerous and  more  sharply  affected  by  the  difficulties 
of  the  present.  In  some  respects  this  Ireland  is,  I 
think,  the  unhappiest  country  in  all  this  unhappy 
world.  Others  —  Serbia,  Roumania,  Belgium  — 
are  infinitely  more  miserable,  but  they  have  not 
unhappy  souls.  The  chief  reason  is  that  all  her 
emotions  of  patriotism,  hate,  love,  desire  for  ac- 
tion, are  suppressed.  I  do  not  mean  suppressed 
in  the  sense  of  being  put  down  by  force,  like  sedi- 
tious meetings,  rebellious  organizations,  or  scur- 
rilous newspapers.  I  mean  suppressed  by  circum- 
stance and  the  conflict  of  the  emotions  themselves. 

The  history  of  Ireland  up  to  the  last  century 
has,  of  course,  been  one  long  tale  of  suppression  in 
every  sense  the  word  can  bear;  but  I  am  not  re- 
ferring to  inherited  maladies,  although  no  one  can 
deal  intelligently  with  Ireland  who  fails  to  take 
into  account  the  reaction  of  her  past  upon  a  people 
vividly,  abnormally  conscious  of  it.  I  speak 
rather  of  the  immediate  suppressions  of  the  pres- 
ent. Patriotism,  for  example,  in  Ireland,  even 
among  the  bitterest  Sinn  Feiners,  is  a  mixed  brew 
of  fierce  love  for  Ireland  with  enthusiasm  for  the 
cause  of  the  AUies ;  and  when  their  distrust  of  Eng- 


72  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

land  blocks  the  way  of  sympathy  with  democracy, 
the  result  is  a  choked  utterance  and  hysterical  ac- 
tions. Hate  for  England  is  an  honest,  though  not 
an  admirable  sentiment  in  Ireland,  but  even  that 
gets  no  free  outlet,  for  whatever  England  may 
have  been  in  the  past  or  may  intend  in  the  future, 
it  is  clear  even  to  the  most  impassioned  intellect 
that  she  has  been  fighting  an  avowed  tyrant.  And 
it  is  evident  to  more  thoughtful  observers  that  the 
anger  hurled  at  liberal-minded,  present-day  Eng- 
land should  often  be  reserved  for  Ulster,  or  a  wing 
of  the  Tory  party,  or  for  mere  unfortunate  cir- 
cumstance. Love  for  Ireland  turns  to  gall  daily 
as  the  Irish  factions  wrangle  and  backbite  and 
forget,  not  only  the  larger  issues  of  the  war,  but 
even  the  welfare  of  Ireland.  Suppressed  desire  for 
action  is  the  keenest  torment  of  all.  It  has  al- 
ways been  characteristic  of  Irishmen  to  spend 
their  energies  freely  wherever  feeling  ran  high. 
They  have  been  in  all  wars  everywhere  among  the 
white  races,  and  in  politics  wherever  a  man  speaking 
English  could  vote.  They  have  always  loved  ac- 
tion more  than  the  fruits  of  action ;  and  yet  in  our 
war  —  the  greatest  of  enterprises  —  they  stood 
aside  or  entered  with  troubled  hearts.  They  went 
about  their  business  (and  few  Southern  Irishmen 
care  fundamentally  for  business)  while  the  rest  of 
the  world  dropped  prose  for  rough  poetry  and 


THE  IRISH  MIND  73 

emotional  sluggishness  for  intense  activity.  As  a 
result,  minds  are  fevered;  they  became  like  mis- 
chievous boys  kept  indoors  on  a  rainy  day.  Sup- 
pression is  always  dangerous.  When  windows  are 
shut,  the  house  grows  sour  and  moldy. 

But  this  suppression  as  one  sees  it  in  Ireland  is 
perhaps  also  only  a  symptom.  The  real  malady 
of  the  Irish  state  results  from  deeper  causes,  and 
is  of  the  tragic  sort  of  which  great  drama  is  made. 
Irish  literature  is  solemn  with  its  note.  Irish 
brawls  attain  a  dignity  because  of  it,  which  we  of 
the  outer  world  admit  by  the  attention  we  give 
them,  but  are  at  a  loss  to  understand.  In  Ireland, 
the  age-long,  universal  conflict  between  realist  and 
idealist  fights  its  sharpest  and  least  conclusive  bat- 
tles. In  Ireland,  this  conflict  in  philosophies  of 
living,  like  everything  else,  is  abnormal,  and  its 
exaggeration  may  explain  abnormality  in  other 
directions  and  may  be  the  ultimate  cause  of  her 
unfortunate  suppressions. 

You  cannot  bring  twelve  men  together  anywhere 
in  the  world  without  feeling  their  division  into 
tough  and  tender-minded,  into  those  who  are  in- 
terested in  facts  and  those  others  whose  minds  are 
stirred  chiefly  by  ideas  and  emotions.  And  the 
tough  are  usually  too  tough,  the  tender  too  tender, 
and  conflict  between  them  is  inevitable.  So  it  is 
in  Ireland,  where  a  South  which,  in  spite  of  its 


74  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

shrewdness,  is  predominantly  idealist  and  "  ten- 
der-minded "  faces  an  Ulster  and  a  landed  aristoc- 
racy which,  in  spite  of  its  sentimental  obstinacy 
in  religion  and  economics,  is  realist  and  "  practi- 
cal." And  there  is  this  added  circumstance,  that 
it  is  "  tough-minded "  realists  in  England  who 
have  usually  governed  or  tried  to  govern  the  Irish 
idealists.  Even  Spenser  became  a  realist  when  he 
turned  from  Faeryland  to  write  of  the  Irish  about 
him. 

Barring  the  Ulster  party,  some  of  the  Southern 
Unionists,  and  the  hierarchy  of  the  Roman  Catho- 
lic Church,  Ireland  is  the  most  hopelessly  idealistic 
of  modern  nations.  Life  proceeds  from  idea  to 
emotion,  not  from  fact  to  fact,  and  happiness  de- 
pends upon  a  state  of  mind,  not  upon  welfare  of 
body.  Talk  proceeds  in  Dublin  with  fiery  light- 
ness because  the  speaker  for  the  time  breathes  and 
lives  in  the  ideas  which  form  and  reform  as  he 
speaks.  In  the  country  the  peasants  are  rich  in 
humor,  joy,  and  sorrow  in  huts  that  an  American 
"  dago  "  would  despise.  Ideas,  principles,  emo- 
tions, which  with  us  seldom  see  the  light,  are  the 
worn  coin  of  Irish  currency.  All  pockets  are  full 
of  them,  and  on  their  exchange  the  business  of  life 
is  based.  You  are  poor  without  them,  wealthy 
with  them,  even  if  in  poverty  and  distress.  It  is 
the  rich  and  facile  idealism  that  Dr.  Johnson  could 


THE  miSH  MIND  76 

never  understand  in  Goldsmith  which  we  love  and 
condemn  and  misunderstand  in  the  Irish  today. 

In  its  upper  ranges,  this  Irish  idealism  is  a  de- 
sire for  spirituality,  for  poetry,  for  beauty  of 
thought  and  feehng,  and  so  is  in  sharpest  conflict 
with  our  prosaic  industrial  civilization.  This  is 
the  idealism  of  the  Irish  literary  movement  and  of 
the  fine  minds  among  the  Sinn  Feiners.  It  is  "  un- 
practical "  only  in  its  tendency  to  go  around 
facts  instead  of  over  them.  In  its  lower  ranges, 
this  idealism  manifests  itself  as  a  desire  for  joy 
and  "  easiness  "  of  living,  and  so  is  opposed  to  cur- 
rent conceptions  of  efficiency,  industry,  and  prog- 
ress for  the  sake  of  getting  on.  It  may  be  due 
to  climate,  or  to  race,  or  to  circumstance,  but  un- 
doubtedly it  is  there.  We  as  a  nation,  and  England 
as  a  nation,  want  an  orderly,  progressive,  produc- 
tive state.  The  Irish  wish  a  happy  one,  which 
might  conceivably  be  disorderly,  unprogressive, 
and  just  productive  enough  to  keep  the  citizens 
going;  and  almost  certainly  would  not  be  efficient 
according  to  our  ideas  of  efficiency.  Grattan's 
Home  Rule  Ireland  was  a  scene  of  wild  disorders, 
yet  all  testimony  goes  to  prove  that  it  was  rela- 
tively a  happy  time  for  Ireland,  when  Irishmen,  in 
the  midst  of  corruption  and  conflict,  were  better 
satisfied  and  more  productive  than  before  or  since. 

This  same  too  logical  idealism  makes  trouble 


76  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

in  international  affairs.  All  Nationalist  Ireland 
warmed  to  President  Wilson's  declaration  of  the 
rights  of  small  peoples  and  a  rule  of  justice.  His 
program,  with  all  its  implications,  was  better 
understood  there  than  even  in  America.  But 
when  it  came  to  supporting  the  Alliance  which 
alone  could  make  it  effective,  principle  encountered 
fact,  and  the  Irishman  became  indecisive.  Senti- 
ment for  Irish  self-determination  collided  with  the 
rough  fact  that  he  must  fight  for  England  in  order 
to  win  the  right  to  it.  Ireland  became  sullen,  un- 
happy, a  liability,  not  an  asset,  in  the  world- 
struggle  for  better  international  government. 

Facts,  indeed,  elude  them.  "  If  England,"  I 
said  to  a  conservative  Sinn  Feiner,  "  is  beaten  in 
this  war,  as  you  believe  she  will  be,  the  burden  of 
fighting  off  Germany  will  fall  crushingly  upon 
France  and  America."  —  "  If  England  is  beaten, 
and  France  and  America  must  carry  on  the  war," 
he  replied,  *'  there'll  be  no  men  but  only  old  women 
left  in  Ireland."  **  What  good  will  your  handful 
of  soldiers  do  us  then?  "  was  the  inevitable  answer. 

It  is  the  refinement  of  these  ideals  into  a  national 
program  which  gives  Sinn  Fein  its  strength. 
Otherwise  it  would  be  less  than  Bolshevist,  for  it 
would  be  inspired  merely  by  hate,  poverty,  and  the 
desire  for  power.  *'  I  do  not  understand  Sinn 
Fein,"  said  one  of  the  best  known  of  the  National- 


THE  IRISH  MIND  77 

ist  M.  P.'s.  "  It  is  not  a  party ;  it  is  an  emotion, 
or  a  dissipation."  That  is  precisely  true.  The 
Sinn  Fein  party  is  after  ends  not  means ;  and  its 
ends  are  Irish  self-respect,  a  sense  of  national  be- 
ing, the  right  to  live  and  think  and  act  in  an  Irish 
way.  The  means  —  no  one  seems  to  have  thought 
out  the  means  in  terms  of  a  possible  Ireland  in  an 
existing  world-empire;  and  hence  they  run  all  the 
way  from  peaceful  penetration  to  open  rebellion. 
The  strength  of  the  Ulster  party  is  its  realism, 
and  its  position  is  exactly  opposite.  Here  the 
means  are  all  codified  and  can  be  put  into  statis- 
tics :  so  much  prosperity  to  be  protected  from 
Southern  inefficiency,  so  many  determined  Prot- 
estants afraid  of  Roman  Catholic  domination. 
But  its  ends  are  the  maintenance  of  a  status  quo 
which  has  not  allowed  a  really  peaceful  moment  to 
Ireland  for  hundreds  of  years.  This  is  idealism 
with  a  vengeance,  the  acute  sense  of  the  needs  of 
the  present  which  keeps  men  sane  and  also  makes 
them  dangerous  in  an  age  that  is  changing  its 
garments.  Extreme  realists  like  Sir  Edward  Car- 
son, stiff-necked  and  efficient,  extreme  idealists  like 
Pearse,  the  educational  reformer,  who  rebelled  in 
order  to  advertise  the  danger  of  neglecting  Ire- 
land, are  in  inevitable  conflict  with  a  hopeful  set- 
tlement as  well  as  with  each  other.  Thus  a  cleav- 
age in  temperament  runs  throughout  Ireland,  and 


78  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

between  Ireland  and  those  Scotch  and  Welsh  and 
English  who,  by  the  logic  of  circumstance,  are  set 
to  govern  an  '*  intractable  "  people. 

Personally,  I  think  that  there  will  be  no  final 
solution  of  the  Irish  problem  in  our  time ;  because 
I  believe  that  Ireland  is  one  of  the  world's  volca- 
noes, where  the  hidden  fire  of  human  grievance  will 
always  break  out  until  the  cooling  of  the  Irish 
temperament  crusts  over  her  hot  emotions.  The 
"  practical "  man  will  always  oppose  the  man 
whose  ideals  are  emotional,  as  long  as  there  are 
black  and  white  in  the  world ;  and  in  Ireland  they 
are  purer  bred  in  their  respective  temperaments 
than  elsewhere.  Yet  evil  conditions  have  enor- 
mously aggravated,  if  they  have  not  caused,  this 
conflict. 

And  there  is  a  middle  party  in  Ireland,  whose 
remedies  may  save  her  from  ruin.  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett,  or  someone  of  his  quality,  is  its  pre- 
destined leader.  It  will  stand  for  the  economic 
independence  of  Ireland  and  a  policy  which  will 
make  it  possible  for  her  to  prosper  without  extend- 
ing the  unlovable  factory  system  into  regions  bet- 
ter suited  for  agriculture;  and  it  will  point  to  a 
half-million  farmers  who  already  have  won  their 
way  out  of  poverty  by  such  a  program.  It  will 
be  a  party  of  conciliation  between  Catholics  and 
Protestants.     It  will  favor  a  separate  state  or 


THE  IRISH  MIND  79 

states  for  Ulster,  on  the  American  model,  but  keep 
her  bound  to  Ireland,  where  she  belongs  first  by 
trade-relations,  and  second  by  the  religious  and 
racial  affinities  of  her  little-heard-of  Nationalist 
constituencies.  It  will  advocate  Home  Rule,  of 
course ;  but  a  status  that  at  present  wiU  of  neces- 
sity be  less  independent  than  Canada's  or  Austra- 
lia's. For  Ireland,  internationally  regarded,  is 
now  England's  back-door,  and,  until  the  world  is 
surely  made  safer,  will  remain  so. 

Against  such  a  policy,  dreamers  among  the  Sinn 
Fein  and  Tories  in  Ulster  will  irrevocably  struggle, 
and  the  battle  will  last  beyond  our  generation.  If 
only  a  moderate  government  can  be  kept  in  the 
saddle,  one  hopes  that  the  battle  will  last,  and  keep 
Ireland  so  busy  and  so  interesting  to  Irishmen 
that  the  rest  of  the  world  may  be  permitted  to 
profit  by  her  genius  without  being  distracted  by 
her  woes.  I  am  not  of  the  opinion  of  those  whose 
heaven  on  earth  is  a  stretch  of  fat  prairie  upon 
which  all  men  are  equally  prosperous,  think  alike, 
work  alike,  agree  in  everything  as  their  cattle 
agree,  and  die  like  their  crops,  leaving  nothing  but 
wealth  behind  them.  There  must  be  some  patches 
of  irritation  left  on  the  earth's  surface,  or  we  shall 
all  decline  into  sluggish  mediocrity;  and  Ireland 
is  bound  to  be  one  of  them.  We  cannot  make  a 
plodding  and  sensible  community  —  a  Holland  or 


80  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

a  Pennsylvania  —  out  of  a  national  personality 
which,  whether  by  harsh  circumstance  or  native 
tendency,  is  now  part  genius,  part  fanatic,  part 
hard-headed  materialist.  We  have  room,  indeed, 
for  a  turbulent  Ireland,  if  only  for  the  by-prod- 
ucts, the  sparks  of  wit  and  poetry  and  idealist 
anger  shooting  worldwide  and  kindling.  But  an 
Ireland  with  a  grievance,  an  Ireland  forced  into 
dependency,  with  the  faults  of  a  dependent,  an  Ire- 
land spreading  the  infection  of  prejudice  and  hate 
—  that  is  a  different  matter. 

My  conclusion  then  is,  that  it  is  a  waste  of  en- 
ergy for  Americans  to  bewail  Ireland  or  to  con- 
demn her;  to  support  Home  Rule  or  the  status 
quo;  to  argue  for  dominion  government  or  stern 
repression,  until  they  better  understand  the  inner 
nature  of  the  Irish  mind  and  the  conflict  that  is 
waging.  After  that,  they  will  still  violently  dis- 
agree upon  the  responsibility  for  the  present  sit- 
uation and  upon  the  means  of  curing  it,  but  at  least 
they  will  not  beat  the  air. 

It  is  not  loss  but  gain  to  feel  the  powerful  fas- 
cination of  Ireland.  I  would  rather  talk  in  Dub- 
lin than  elsewhere,  save  in  the  Elysian  Fields ;  I 
would  rather  walk  in  the  Dargle  or  on  Antrim 
moors  than  anywhere  except  in  my  own  New  Eng- 
land ;  I  would  rather  live,  if  life  were  to  be  all  ex- 
citement and  spiritual  conflict,  in  Ireland  than  in 


THE  miSH  MIND  81 

any  country  of  the  world ;  I  would  rather  be  with 
an  Irishman  in  a  trench  than  with  a  Prussian  in 
heaven.  But  if  Ireland  ceases  to  be  a  pricking  in 
the  side  of  civilization;  if  she  becomes  a  country 
where  a  man  can  be  native  and  yet  keep  his  temper ; 
if  from  the  joy  of  living  near  beautiful  mountains, 
in  a  country  greener  than  spring  in  America,  in  a 
society  rich  with  humor  and  easily  pleased  with  the 
daily  business  of  living,  is  to  be  abstracted  the 
pathos  of  physical  misery,  the  bitterness  of  con- 
flict and  suppression,  it  will  be  because  the  Irish 
mind  finds  stable  levels  and  can  accept  and  apply 
practical  cures  and  suggestions.  We  must  dimly 
understand  that  mind,  or  we,  only  less  than  Eng- 
land, will  pay  a  price. 

The  Prussian  program  is  said  to  have  been  to 
drive  out  the  Irish  and  colonize  the  island  with 
Saxons  and  Bavarians.  They  were  willing  to  gov- 
ern Ireland,  but  not  the  Irish.  What  she  really 
needs  is  a  free  fight,  legally  arranged  for,  umpired 
but  not  interfered  with  —  a  continuous  perform- 
ance in  which  every  Irishman  can  join  without  fear 
of  being  jailed  by  a  timorous  England.  Weapons 
cannot  be  allowed,  although  many  think  they  would 
be  the  more  merciful  arbiters.  Tie  hands  and  feet 
if  you  will  —  in  other  words  make  the  struggle 
constitutional,  —  but  permit  no  peace  without  vic- 
tory and  no  appeal  to  England  or  America.     Not 


82  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

until  they  have  fought  it  out,  will  the  Irish  mind 
be  cured  and  realist  and  idealist  compromise  in 
Ireland.  And  compromise,  self-determined,  is  the 
only  hope  for  a  stable  Irish  government. 


IV 

ON   THE    SENSE    OF   RACE 

Americans  discovered  the  sense  of  race,  with  a 
start,  somewhere  in  the  latter  end  of  1914,  and  are 
not  likely  to  be  allowed  to  forget  it  in  our  time. 
The  success  of  the  nation  we  had  been  making  here 
for  some  centuries  had  gone  to  our  heads  perhaps, 
and  made  us  forget  how  little  immigration  or  edu- 
cation or  such  accidents  affect  the  subconscious 
self  which  is  the  real  man.  We  did  not  know  that 
when  our  ancestors  intermarried  they  crossed  the 
wires  down  which  the  strong  current  of  racial  in- 
stinct had  been  flowing,  and  entailed  upon  us  a 
heavy  responsibility. 

I  remember  an  Irish  girl  in  the  slum  streets  of 
Belfast ;  a  black  shawl  over  her  black  hair,  eyes  of 
corn  flower  blue,  rosy  blood  pulsing  under  her 
pallor,  every  curve  of  her,  every  look  of  her  breath- 
ing race.  She  did  not  have  to  think;  she  did  not 
have  to  feel ;  she  was  all  Irish. 

And  I  remember  a  captain's  wife  of  the  enduring 
English  t^'pe  of  the  eighteenth  century.  There 
was  a  solidity  in  her  graceful  beauty  that  denied 
the  word.  Her  face  was  flowerlike,  but  it  was  a 
tulip,  not  an  airier  flower.  There  was  a  plenitude 
of  material  for  the  making  of  it.  The  lines  were 
firm,  the  curves  long  and  firmly  swung.     Hers  was 

83 


84  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

a  perfected  type,  unlike  our  American  beauty 
which  is  the  fruit  of  a  happy  climate  and  instincts 
freely  moving.  Personality  she  doubtless  had  of 
her  own,  and  a  mind  of  her  own  making ;  but  with- 
out them  she  would  have  eased  the  eye  of  the  stran- 
ger :  there  was  such  a  peaceful  conciliation  among 
her  elements,  as  if  through  long  ages  they  had 
learned  to  live  and  move  together  in  a  racial  pat- 
tern. One  felt  that  she  had  been  bred  to  fit  and 
adorn  her  world. 

And  I  remember  a  little  Gascon  poilu,  dancing 
while  his  leave-train  waited  at  the  station  of  Ver- 
sailles. With  a  roguish  eye  cocked  at  us,  he  flung 
himself  into  the  rhythm,  while  some  one  piped  from 
the  nearest  carriage,  then  stopped  posing  with 
head  flung  back,  and  poured  libation  to  aU  the  gods 
with  a  stream  of  wine  squirted  from  his  canteen  in 
a  crimson  arc  into  his  opened  mouth.  The  gesture 
was  inimitably  Latin.  It  was  as  much  a  part  of 
him  as  his  quick  eye  or  his  explosive  French. 

We  have  lost  all  that  in  America,  and  it  wiU  be 
centuries,  perhaps,  before  we  regain  it.  Our 
mixed  bloods  beat  together,  and  keep  a  constant 
tension  which  helps  to  determine  the  nervous  pitch 
of  our  lives.  We  have  mixed  many  virtues,  mixed 
many  \'ices,  mixed  tendencies  and  reactions.  As 
a  result  we  are  the  most  tolerant  of  people,  but  a 
little  sketchy  in  our  type.  The  American,  in  fact, 
is  not  made,  but  making ;  he  is  synthesis  on  a  scale 
never  before  attempted,  and  needs  time  for  the  ex- 
periment to  reach  its  consummation. 

The  war  has  made  him  conscious  of  his  racial 
heterogeneity.     It  has  turned  the  X-ray  upon  his 


ON  THE  SENSE  OF  RACE  85 

interior  processes  and  revealed  a  metamorphosis 
not  yet  complete.  He  has  become  vividly  aware  of 
being  a  new  racial  creation,  and  unduly  self-con- 
scious of  the  details.  Hence  every  British  sailor 
who,  rolling  homeward,  asked  how  fast  the  troops 
were  coming  over,  every  school  child  of  France  who 
ran  black-frocked  down  the  garden  to  wave  a 
flag  and  cry  "Vive  L'Amerique,"  pleased  him,  made 
him  feel  surer  that  there  had  been  marriage  in  his 
blood.  He  stepped  out  more  confidently ;  repeated 
E  Pluribus  Unum  with  a  proud  and  thankful  heart. 
Some  of  this  doubt,  some  of  this  confidence,  some 
of  this  concern  that  America  should  be  truly 
American  enter  into  the  essays  of  this  book. 


INNOCENTS    ABROAD 

Even  before  the  war  Americans  were  curious  as 
to  what  other  nations  thought  of  them,  and  so  I 
make  no  apology  for  beginning  what  I  have  to 
write  with  a  pertinent  conversation  in  which  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  took  part. 

"  Unless  you  are  forewarned  by  experience," 
said  Mr.  Wells,  "  you  underestimate  the  American 
in  the  first  ten  minutes  of  conversation.  Then 
you  begin  to  understand.  He  has  the  enormous 
advantage  of  being  elemental  and  unsophisticated. 
He  is  a  breath  of  fresh  air.     Europe  needs  him." 

"We  are  'Innocents  Abroad'  again?"  I  sug- 
gested ;  and  Mr.  Wells  and  Mr.  Bennett  agreed. 

Is  it  true.?  Are  we  so  naive,  are  we  "  simple  "? 
We  do  not  so  describe  ourselves  at  home.  But  if 
to  be  elemental  and  unsophisticated  is  merely  the 
state  of  being  young,  Mr.  Wells  is  probably  right. 
Nothing  in  Europe,  not  even  the  French  child,  is  so 
young  as  the  American  Army.  I  have  seen  them 
on  transports  subdued  by  the  endless  horizon  and 
the  grim  unreality  of  the  striped  and  blotched 
ships  of  the  convoy.  I  have  seen  them  lost  and  a 
little  homesick  in  tangled  London,  and  in  Paris 
"  jollying  "  one  another  over  the  hats  of  an  admir- 

86 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  87 

ing  populace.  I  have  caught  the  distinctive  spring 
of  their  march  ahead  on  dusty  roads  behind  the 
British  front ;  passed  village  after  village  of  what 
was  once  French  France  bubbling  over  with  their 
hearty  figures ;  noted  the  sharp  profiles  of  Ameri- 
cans on  guard  at  twilight  by  the  entrance  of  ruined 
towns.  Among  troops,  only  the  Australians 
looked  as  young  as  the  Americans.  The  poilus 
might  have  been  their  fathers  —  many  of  them, 
indeed,  were  old  enough  to  be,  —  but  it  was  not 
age,  it  was  experience,  that  made  the  difference. 
They  looked  tired ;  and  so,  no  doubt,  did  the  Ger- 
mans. Our  men  were  fresh  physically  and  fresh 
mentally.  They  had  the  vigor  and  eagerness  of 
youth. 

It  was  not  the  physical  freshness,  which  must 
have  passed  after  six  months  in  the  field,  but  this 
mental  freshness  of  the  Americans  that  was  the 
new  factor  for  war  in  Europe.  I  watched  a  French 
general  as,  surrounded  by  his  staff,  he  decorated 
three  American  aviators  with  the  Croix  de  Guerre, 
while  an  American  and  a  French  regiment  stood  at 
attention.  The  band  of  drums,  fifes,  and  brass 
had  just  finished  "  The  Marseillaise,"  the  baton 
had  waved  for  "  The  Star-Spangled  Banner,"  when 
a  sudden  command  hushed  the  musicians  and  split 
wide  the  ranks.  Then  down  a  long  lane  of  soldiers 
six  Nieuports  roared,  taking  the  air,  to  rise  and 


88  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

turn  and  shoot  one  after  the  other  northward 
where  the  Germans  had  crossed  the  line.  You 
could  see  the  eyes  of  our  boys  sparkle  and  their 
cheeks  flush.  The  French  held  steady.  What 
was  one  alerte  more  to  those  dark  little  fellows  with 
their  long  coats  and  their  slender  bayonets  ?  They 
were  workers  at  a  trade,  skilful,  untiring,  unmoved. 
Youth  had  gone  out  of  them. 

Again,  one  night  it  was  my  privilege  to  go  to  a 
dangerous  trench  where  men  from  my  own  State 
and  my  own  town  were  holding  a  position  that  had 
been  "  rushed  "  only  a  little  while  before,  had  been 
retaken,  and  might  at  any  moment  see  the  shock 
troops  once  more  coming  over  and  the  barrage 
again  begin.  It  was  just  dawn  as  we  stole  down 
a  road  the  enemy  were  watching;  the  first  bird- 
songs  were  ominous  of  growing  light.  It  was  too 
dark  to  see  the  sentinel  in  his  shell-pit  until  his 
bayonet  stopped  us ;  light  enough  to  catch  a  glim- 
mer from  the  line  of  gray,  expectant  faces  of  the 
men  who  held  the  trench.  It  was  a  battle-scene  as 
the  dawn  came  on,  machine-guns  trained  at  each 
bay,  nests  of  grenades  ready  for  hurling,  signal- 
flares  still  rising  from  the  German  lines,  and  in  the 
bottom  of  the  trench  dark  figures  of  men,  dog- 
tired  from  their  watch,  rolled  in  the  water  and  the 
slime. 

It  would  have  made  an  effective  lithograph,  but 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  89 

the  picture  would  have  been  misleading;  for  these 
were  neither  desperate  heroes  nor  hardened  vet- 
erans. They  were  boys,  a  little  nervous,  a  little 
tense  with  excitement,  content  that  day  was  ap- 
proaching, but  eager  that  something  should  hap- 
pen; talking  of  breakfast  and  cursing  the  mosqui- 
toes, but  thinking  most  of  the  real  push  that  was 
coming. 

The  contrast  with  the  fine  poilus  in  the  quiet 
trenches  beyond  Verdun  was  striking.  "  Bonjour, 
mon  fls,"  said  our  old  colonel  to  the  first  be- 
medaled  breast  we  encountered  in  the  somnolence 
of  the  front  line  at  noon.       "  How  goes  it.''  " 

"  Bien,  bien,  mon  colonel.  One  habituates  one- 
self after  a  while  to  this  quiet  life." 

That  is  the  attitude  of  the  professional,  neither 
desiring  trouble  nor  moved  by  it.  It  was  the 
spirit  of  the  Tommies  I  saw  on  Viray  Ridge,  joking 
in  their  dugouts  to  escape  the  weariness  of  a  war 
where  they  were  ready  to  hold  on  forever,  but  co\ild 
take  no  joy.  It  was  very  different  from  the  eager 
expectancy  of  the  Americans,  with  tomorrow  al- 
ways in  their  minds.  And  is  not  that  almost  a 
definition  of  youth.'*  French  and  British  alike 
were  thanking  Heaven  that  our  army  was  young 
in  years  and  youthful  in  mind  and  in  hope.  If  we 
were  unsophisticated  in  warfare,  let  us  be  proud 
of  it. 


90  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

It  was  not  only,  however,  by  our  army's  spirit 
of  youth  that  we  Americans  showed  ourselves  ele- 
mental and  unsophisticated  when  over-seas.  This 
inrush  of  eagerness  into  France,  carrying 
strength,  optimism,  and  a  hope  in  retirement  with 
it,  was  a  new  thing  that  only  those  who  swung 
the  circle  of  the  long  front  line  and  ran  down  the 
spreading  arteries  toward  the  sea  could  fitly  ap- 
preciate. What  fools,  after  all,  we  were  to  sup- 
pose that  dead  things  from  America  —  food,  guns, 
money  —  might  be  more  important  in  a  crisis  than 
the  courage,  force,  and  enthusiasm  that  come  with 
men!  But  this  eager  youth  was  no  more  signifi- 
cant than  the  instinctive  simplicity  —  a  simplicity 
both  unsophisticated  and  elemental  —  which 
Americans  abroad  displayed  in  this  war. 

I  spent,  by  chance,  some  informal  hours  in  a 
single  day  at  two  G.  H.  Q.'s  with  British  generals 
and  their  staffs.  What  struck  me  in  their  talk 
confirmed  many  lesser  impressions.  It  was  of  the 
mind  of  **  Fritz "  that  they  spoke,  of  how  he 
thought  and  how  he  acted,  talk  full  of  respect  for 
a  resourceful,  if  unscrupulous  adversary,  inspired 
with  the  spirit  of  good  sportsmanship  and  an  in- 
timate study  of  man.  And  there  was  constant 
question  of  the  last  British  "  show,"  the  strong  and 
the  weak,  especially  the  weak,  points  of  the  at- 
tack or  defense,  as  if  it  had  been  a  foot-ball  match 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  91 

instead  of  a  death-struggle.  On  another  occasion 
I  crossed  the  torn  hill  of  Douamont  with  a  group 
of  French  officers  who  quite  forgot  their  visitors 
in  the  niceties  of  technical  argument  over  positions 
lost  and  won  there.  The  Americans  in  France 
were  not  like  that.  Their  view  was  narrower 
than  the  British  and  less  expert  than  the 
French.  Without  British  coolness  and  French 
strategy  we  might  easily  have  wrecked  ourselves  in 
this  war.  But  the  American,  nevertheless,  went 
instinctively  to  what  may,  after  all,  be  the  heart  of 
the  military  problem.  He  was  absorbed  in  the 
"  business  "  of  warfare  —  construction,  transpor- 
tation, organization.  His  imagination  moved  by 
leaps  to  vast  enterprises  for  a  year  after  tomor- 
row, and  his  energy,  all  steam  up,  came  puffing 
after.  What  was  happening  on  the  remainder  of 
the  front  only  occasionally  concerned  him.  In- 
stinctively he  seemed  to  feel  that  modern  war  was 
a  business,  to  be  so  conducted,  to  be  so  ended,  and 
that  let  happen  what  might  in  Paris  or  Flanders  or 
Mesopotamia,  his  prescription  was  "  to  get  to 
business  "  first  of  all.  Therefore  he  shut  his  mind 
to  military  speculation,  and  met  his  problem  with 
a  single  mind.  He  was  sometimes  disappointed, 
skilful  strategy  occasionally  wrecked  his  hopeful 
labors  half  completed ;  but  at  least  he  acted  not  on 
theory,  but  upon  the  facts  as  they  were  flung  at 
his  head  in  France. 


92  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

Yet  this  same  soldier  did,  by  European  stand- 
ards, speculate  most  wildly  on  questions  of  war 
aims  and  world  readjustments  after  the  war.  An 
English  "  Tommy  '*  was  blank  when  you  asked  him 
what  would  happen  when  Germany  was  defeated, 
a  French  poilu  would  shrug  his  shoulders ;  but  it 
was  a  poor-spirited  "doughboy  "  who  had  no  the- 
ory as  to  the  remolding  of  powers  and  principali- 
ties. America,  indeed,  was  the  one  nation,  always 
excepting  Germany,  that  committed  itself  in  this 
already  sufficiently  difficvdt  war  to  a  reconstruc- 
tion of  the  world.  And  it  is  this,  I  think,  that  the 
Europeans  chiefly  have  in  mind  when  they  call  us 
*'  elemental  "  and,  in  irritable  moments,  "  inno- 
cent." It  is  the  American  in  world  politics  that 
they  mean,  from  President  Wilson  down  to  the 
casual  dinner-guest  who  in  the  midst  of  conversa- 
tion as  to  what  the  Swede  intend,  and  what  the 
French,  blandly  states  that  Europe  must  of  course 
be  reorganized  according  to  a  system  entirely  new. 
Our  world  policy  is  just  as  instinctive  as  our  ob- 
session with  business. 

Even  the  greatest  among  us  are  naive  as  we  con- 
front European  diplomacy  and  European  en- 
tanglements. This  is  our  strength  —  a  strength 
as  great  as  the  vigor  of  our  youth.  The  instinct 
and  the  will  for  vast  political  rearrangements  are 
anesthetized  in  the  European  bourgeois  —  anes- 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  9S 

thetized  by  custom  and  fatigue.  They  are  to  be 
found,  of  course,  in  outstanding  persons,  more  so 
perhaps  than  at  home,  and  also  in  organized  bodies 
such  as  constitute  the  extreme  left  of  every  Euro- 
pean legislature.  Their  programs  are  sufficiently 
radical,  as  we  well  know ;  but  John  Smith,  the 
draper's  assistant,  and  Gaspard  Le  Fevre,  the 
huissier,  are  too  aware  of  the  social  fabric  in  which 
they  live  and  work  to  dream  easily  of  a  different 
future.  They  lack  the  free-moving  imagination 
of  the  Kansan  or  Oregonian,  who,  for  all  his  ma- 
terial practicality,  has  seen  and  felt  a  continent 
shaped  to  his  uses  and  old  laws  stretched  to  fit  new 
needs.  They  lack  most  of  aU  the  experience  of 
the  melting-pot,  antagonistic  races  forgetting 
their  antagonisms  in  the  possession  of  relative 
political  and  economic  freedom,  intermarrying  in- 
stead of  preparing  to  fight,  exchanging,  though 
slowly,  racial  prejudice  for  national  pride.  Amer- 
ica is  just  entering,  I  suppose,  upon  her  greatest 
problems,  and  yet  we  believe,  at  least,  that  we  can 
teach  the  world  one  fact:  federation  of  races  and 
sovereignties,  both  political  and  economical,  is 
possible,  has  been  accomplished.  The  United 
States  of  Civilization,  if  it  comes,  will  certainly  not 
be  an  imitation  of  our  republic,  but  our  faith  in 
such  a  divine,  far-off  event  springs  from  "  the 
great  American  experiment  "  itself.     And  we  have 


94  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

with  us  the  free-thinking  Canadians,  New  Zea- 
landers,  Australians,  who  already,  according  to  re- 
liable testimony,  have  broken  up  the  political  iner- 
tia of  the  British  with  whom  they  have  mingled  at 
the  front. 

All  this  is  in  the  sub-consciousness  of  the 
American  abroad,  and  makes  him  seem  naive  to 
the  critical  and  **  elemental "  to  the  friendly, 
among  the  Alhes.  Sometimes  it  is  very  far 
within.  No  one  puts  speculation  as  to  the  im- 
mediate future  so  definitely  aside  as  the  Amer- 
ican organizer  in  France !  no  one  can  go  so 
whole-heartedly  after  the  "  first  objective  "  and 
let  strategy  take  care  of  itself.  That,  as  I 
have  said,  is  one  of  our  contributions  to  the 
war.  But  if  we  talk  politics  at  all  in  Europe,  it 
is  the  politics  of  the  future,  not  of  the  past.  We 
refuse  to  be  bound  by  the  "  lessons  of  history," 
even  when  we  know  them,  which  is  not  often  the 
case.  We  insist  upon  regarding  the  Balkans  as 
potential  Louisianas  or  New  Mexicos,  upon  dis- 
cussing Trieste  in  terms  of  St.  Louis  and  the  open 
waters  of  the  Mississippi,  upon  believing  that  the 
Germans  of  Germany  are  only  Milwaukee  Ger- 
mans, after  all,  controlled  of  late  by  a  Teutonized 
Tammany  Hall. 

All  this  is  very  naive,  of  course,  and  very  inno- 
cent, and  the  diplomat  of  the  old  European  brand 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  95 

endeavors  not  to  be  sarcastic  as  he  states  the  man- 
ifold and  documented  objections  —  unchanging 
human  nature,  commercial  rivalries,  pride  of  sov- 
ereignty, and  the  rest.  But  the  light-hearted 
American  is  not  silenced. 

"  I  believe  in  a  different  future  because  yours 
is  impossible ;  your  alternative  implies  a  continua- 
tion of  armaments  and  war  to  the  brink,  or  beyond 
it,  of  degeneration.  It  is  better,  but  not  much 
better,  than  the  domination  of  German  Kultur. 
You  counsel  black  pessimism;  but  why  be  pessi- 
mistic until  we  have  made  a  push  with  optimism.'' 
The  world  after  the  war  will  be  what  we  make  it, 
not  what  it  was." 

Alas !  it  is  far  easier  to  be  pessimistic  than  opti- 
mistic, even  in  1919.  It  is  easy  to  urge  the  Amer- 
ican program  for  the  rights  of  all  peoples,  for  self- 
development  within  bounds  laid  down  by  the  wel- 
fare of  all ;  but  it  is  hard  to  keep  up  the  mood  of 
youth  in  solitary  thought.  To  plan  a  world  for 
1930  that  will  be  better  than  1913,  better  even 
than  the  present,  requires  an  act  of  faith.  Never- 
theless, one  cannot  take  part  in  such  conversa- 
tions without  feeling  the  crude,  fresh  air  of  which 
Wells  spoke  blowing  freely.  And  there  are  sev- 
eral circumstances  of  great  importance  which  must 
be  highly  considered  before  the  platform  upon 
which  America  entered  the  war  is  condemned  as  a 


96  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

naive  and  shallow  idealism.  For  it  may  be  wise 
and  not  foolish  to  be  naive,  to  be  elemental,  in  this 
age  of  the  world. 

Note  first,  that  among  all  the  *'  war  aims  "  as 
expressed  from  time  to  time  by  the  chief  belliger- 
ents, only  three  looked  toward  the  future.  The 
expressed  and  authorized  aims  of  Great  Britain, 
except  (an  important  exception)  in  so  far  as  they 
echo  our  own,  looked  toward  the  righting  of 
wrongs  and  the  perpetuation  of  justice  as  justice 
was  understood  in  1914.  The  expressed  aims  of 
France  were  identical.  Russia  —  what  is  left  of 
Russia  under  the  Bolshevik  regime  —  dealt  en- 
tirely in  "  futures,"  as  they  say  on  the  stock- 
exchange,  but  the  abundant  idealism  in  her  cer- 
tificates has  little  security  behind  it.  Russia  has 
mortgaged  her  present  to  a  future  this  generation 
can  scarcely  hope  to  touch.  As  for  Germany,  her 
aims,  as  the  dominant  partj'  expressed  them,  were 
certainly  forward-looking,  but  like  the  famous 
dachshund  that  sought  the  tail  he  had  long  since 
left  behind  him,  it  was  a  pax  Romana,  of  a  kind 
gone,  one  hopes,  forever  that  she  sought;  and  in 
this  future  we  refused  with  all  our  will  and 
strength  to  play  a  part.  There  remained  the 
*'  Wilson  program,"  indefinite,  impossible  of  imme- 
diate realization,  involving  readjustments  each 
more  difficult  than  problems  which  hitherto  have 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  97 

been  solvable  only  by  war,  but  containing  prin- 
ciples of  international  settlement  on  the  basis  of 
national  rights  that  most  men  think  to  be  sound, 
even  though  faith  is  partial  and  full  realization 
improbable  for  our  times.  It  seemed  naive  pre- 
cisely because  it  was  elemental.  In  politics  it  may 
prove  to  have  been  one  of  the  greatest,  and  per- 
haps the  last  effort,  of  that  historical  Renaissance 
which  created  modern  civilization  by  substituting 
a  creative  hope  of  the  future  for  an  ardent  sub- 
servience to  the  past. 

The  second  and  more  obvious  circumstance  was 
very  clear  to  an  observer  who  detached  himself  for 
a  while  from  the  tumultuous  enthusiasm  of  early 
war-time  in  his  native  land.  It  was  that  no  com- 
mon war  aim  but  this  united  the  American  people ; 
that  no  other  war  aim  had  been  given  leadership 
that  was  powerful,  distinctive,  and  our  own.  Bel- 
gium shocked  us,  the  Lusitania  enraged  us,  the 
world  ambitions  of  the  German  empire  stiffened 
our  necks.  We  fought  against  all  these  things. 
But  America,  instinctively  suspicious  of  European 
entanglements  (bred,  in  fact,  on  the  "  Farewell 
Address  "  of  Washington),  instinctively  averse  to 
the  bankrupt  scheme  of  the  balance  of  powers  — 
America  was  moved  to  war  because  by  1917  it  was 
only  by  war  that  we  could  maintain  our  ideals  of 
decent  living.     It  was  "  put  up  or  shut  up,"  as  the 

H 


98  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

old  phrase  goes,  and  we  "  put  up."  President  Wil- 
son expressed,  as  no  one  in  Europe,  the  instinctive 
will  of  a  nation. 

I  have  written  "  as  no  one  in  Europe,"  and  this 
is  the  third  important  circumstance  that  makes 
the  naivete  of  America  something  more  than 
charming  innocence.  Germany  we  may  leave  out 
of  the  argument;  although  much  can  now  be  said 
of  her  leanings;  but  I  dare  to  answer  with  some 
confidence  for  Great  Britain  and  France.  The 
"  breath  of  fresh  air  "  sweeps  through  them  also, 
and  is  preferred  by  a  majority  to  their  own  tradi- 
tional policies.  The  "  American  lead  "  in  interna- 
tional politics  is  better  recognized,  better  sup- 
ported by  a  probable  majority  in  each  country 
than  any  leadership  of  their  own  from  1914  until 
today.  Eighty-five  per  cent  of  the  population  of 
France,  I  was  told  by  an  acute  observer,  himself  a 
Frenchman  in  a  post  where  accurate  and  wide  ob- 
servation was  possible,  support  the  "  Wilson  pro- 
gram "  with  all  its  implications. 

As  for  Great  Britain,  there  are  groups  in  open 
or  concealed  opposition,  and  there  are  many,  as 
everywhere,  who  are  ignorant  of  all  issues ;  but  a 
definite  majority  could  be  polled  for  the  principles 
— I  do  not  say  the  details  —  of  the  "  American 
idea  "  of  what  to  do  after  the  war.  The  most  im- 
portant document  in  international  politics  issued 


INNOCENTS  ABROADJ  99 

in  England  since  1914  is  no  single  speech,  or  all 
the  speeches,  of  the  prime  ministers,  but  the  plat- 
form of  the  united  labor  parties  as  regards  inter- 
national settlement.  And  this  is  in  close  agree- 
ment with  the  principles  which  our  leadership  has 
advanced,  which  most  of  us  support,  and  which 
well  nigh  all  of  us,  including  those  who  dislike 
being  led  or  who  fear  Presidential  autocracy, 
instinctively  crave.  Even  the  Southern  Irish,  who 
differ  from  the  English  on  every  other  conceivable 
point,  agree  with  them  that  President  Wilson  is 
the  political  leader  of  the  English-speaking  world. 
All  this  explains  why  the  governments  and  the 
press  of  the  Allies  speak  to  us  as  one  might,  at 
commencement,  address  high-spirited  boys,  untried 
idealists,  who  hold,  nevertheless,  the  keys  to  the 
future.  It  was  only  a  little  while  ago  that  Firmin 
Roz  published  a  book  in  Paris  which  endeavored  to  . 
prove  to  French  incredulity  that  there  was  more 
idealism  than  materialism  in  America.  And  now, 
whether  you  take  your  evidence  from  the  "  Fi- 
garo," the  "Temps,"  or  the  "Petit  Parisien," 
from  the  mouth  of  Clemenceau  or  Bergson  or  Tar- 
dieu,  the  approach  is  always  the  same.  It  is  an 
efficient  and  practical  nation  they  address,  who 
nevertheless  wills  peace  among  nations,  non-ag- 
gression, and  an  order  where  strength  of  heart  and 
of  mind,  beauty  of  life,  and  fineness  of  spirit  shall 


100  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

have  as  great  a  price  as  might  of  arm  and  the 
power  to  exploit.  And  Great  Britain  speaks  not 
otherwise. 

We  are  not  quite  like  that.  We  are  not  so 
nobly  minded,  nor  so  innocent  as  just  now  they 
wish  to  believe;  we  are  not  so  altruistic,  if  in- 
deed it  be  altruism  to  desire  the  only  world  solu- 
tion that  can  save  us  from  turmoil  in  the  next  gen- 
eration. Nor  are  we  free  from  the  passions  of 
crude  revenge,  the  desires  for  feverish  activity, 
the  liking  for  the  rewards,  pecuniary  and  social,  of 
combat,  which  accompany  war  among  aU  nations. 
Some  of  us  are  militaristic,  some  of  us  are  profi- 
teers, many  of  us  fought  chiefly  for  the  love  of  it. 
The  Western  European  races  and  their  oflFshoots 
do  not  differ  profoundly  one  from  another.  Never- 
theless, what  a  man  is  thought  to  be  he  sometimes 
is,  and  often  becomes ;  and  what  a  man  thinks  him- 
self to  be  is  the  most  important  thing  about  him. 
Europe  believes  and  wants  us  to  be  idealistic.  We 
have  committed  ourselves  to  a  program  of  practi- 
cal idealism.  That  just  now  is  the  most  important 
political  factor  in  the  international  situation. 

It  does  not  take  much  sagacity  to  see  that  there 
are  two  crises  in  this  world  conflict,  one  for  victory 
in  war,  the  other  for  success  in  peace.  Idealism 
is  needed  for  both  if  we  are  to  win  through. 
Through  the  first  crisis  we  have  already  passed. 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  101 

The  prestige  of  the  German  military  leaders  has 
been  broken.  Germany  as  a  whole  has  been  made 
to  feel,  and  therefore  believe,  that  a  policy  of  world 
domination  by  force  does  not  pay.  It  was  not 
necessary,  fortunately,  to  take  Berlin  in  order  to 
prove  by  our  own  exertions  that  the  German  Army 
could  not  impose  its  will.  In  this  our  youthful 
vigor  and  our  business  sense  counted  heavily.  But 
other  factors  counted.  As  a  writer  in  the  "  West- 
minster Gazette  "  said  in  1918,  the  chief  charac- 
teristic of  the  fourth  year  of  war  was  fatigue,  a 
joyless  performance  of  duty  for  which  there  was 
no  cure  but  hope;  not  hope  of  a  meaningless  vic- 
tory, which  would  be  only  a  prelude  to  further 
conflicts  where  what  had  been  saved  or  won  would 
assuredly  be  lost,  and  victor  and  vanquished 
tumble  together  into  the  breakdown  of  civiliza- 
tion, but  the  hope  which  came  from  constructive 
ideas  for  the  future,  firmly  grasped.  I  have  heard 
military  experts  say  again  and  again  that  miUtary 
effectiveness  is  a  matter  of  morale  almost  exclu- 
sively. And  as  the  morale  of  the  men  in  the 
trenches  depended  upon  dry  feet  and  full  stomachs, 
so  surely  did  the  morale  of  the  nation  of  which 
they  were  a  part  depend  upon  moral  enthusiasm. 
We  did  not  go  on  through  the  Argonne  to  destroy 
Germany  or  to  get  back  a  strip  of  land  rendered 
desert  in  the  getting.  There  were  larger  hopes 
than  these  in  the  bitter  cup. 


102  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

The  other  crisis  will  come  now  that  our  morale 
has  proved  itself  stronger  than  the  Germans'.  It 
will  test  us  more  deeply  than  the  first,  for  success 
or  failure  will  depend  upon  whether,  as  a  nation, 
we  can  make  good  our  idealism.  Whoever  thinks 
that  this,  in  comparison  with  "  winning  the  war," 
is  easy,  deludes  himself.  The  greatest  struggles 
of  this  epoch  are  to  be  social  and  political,  not  mil- 
itary, and  this  will  be  one  of  them.  In  order  to 
carry  out  the  principles  we  have  affirmed,  we  may 
have  to  support  policies  directly  counter  to  the 
cherished  ambitions  of  some  of  our  Allies.  We 
may  have  to  withhold  our  hands  and  the  hands  of 
others  from  punishments  richly  deserved  by  an  of- 
fending enemy.  We  shall  certainly  be  forced  to 
cultivate  detachment  from  prejudice  and  greed. 
And  with  equal  certainty,  America,  in  many  re- 
spects the  most  conservative  of  the  great  nations, 
must  be  willing  to  adopt  economic  policies  of  an 
international  character  and  in  violent  opposition 
to  our  protectionist,  individualistic  tradition. 
Without  such  an  exercise  of  self-control  and  self- 
development,  all  talk  of  world  federation  and  the 
prolongation  of  peace  is  moonshine  or  bluff. 

I  am  not  afraid  of  wreck,  if  reconstruction  fol- 
lows. I  am  not  afraid  of  the  results  of  this  war 
pursued  as  it  was  to  its  rightful  end.  Human 
nature  is  more  enduring  than  we  thought,  and  it  is 


INNOCENTS  ABROAD  103 

good  that  we  should  prove  it.  The  stoical  mothers 
of  England,  the  French  children  I  have  seen  play- 
ing in  the  ruins  of  their  cottage  with  rags  bound 
round  their  wounded  heads,  the  gray-headed  poilus 
still  cheerful  after  four  years  of  danger  and  hard- 
ship and  exile  —  these  things  are  good  if  good 
come  of  them.  But  to  trust  alone  to  man's  up- 
rightness under  misery,  to  trust  alone  to  miUtary 
"  preparedness  "  after  the  sermons  writ  large  all 
over  Europe,  is  a  counsel  of  desperation.  It  is  as 
absurd  as  our  old  comfortable  belief  that  war  as  a 
danger  could  safely  be  forgotten ;  as  absurd  as  our 
delusion  that  we  had  only  to  go  about  our  peacef  id 
business  in  disregard  of  the  rest  of  the  world;  as 
wild  a  counsel  as  absolute  non-resistance. 

"  In  time  of  peace  prepare  for  war."  We  must 
learn  that  old  dictum,  and  add  to  it,  "  in  time  of 
war  prepare  for  peace."  Is  it  naive  to  seek  with 
slow  and  hopeful  perseverance  an  alternative  to 
the  wreck  of  states  ?  Is  it  "  mere  idealism  "  to 
plan  that  nations  should  hang  together  instead  of 
separately?  If  so,  thank  God  that  America  seems 
to  be  young  and  innocent  enough  to  lead  in  the  at- 
tempt ! 


V 

ON  MORALE 

A  number  of  years  ago  Professor  Lounsbury 
wrote  a  chapter  to  prove  that  a  language  improved 
or  retrograded  with  the  growth  or  the  retrogres- 
sion of  the  nation  that  spoke  it.  No  artificial 
preservative  would  help  the  tongue  if  the  race 
were  decaying;  neither  slang  nor  colloquialism 
injure  it  if  the  speakers  were  increasing  in  vigor 
and  civilization.  At  first  glance  the  same  thing 
seems  true  of  morale  —  a  virtue  of  which  we  have 
heard  much  since  1914.  Morale  depends  upon  the 
collective  virtues  of  a  race.  When  they  weaken, 
morale  weakens.  When  some  of  them  —  bravery, 
industry,  self-confidence  —  collapse,  sooner  or 
later  morale  collapses  also.  This  was  the  history 
of  Germany  in  the  autumn  of  1918. 

But  there  is  an  important  difference  between 
morale  and  language,  and  one  well  worth  noting 
for  the  precarious  future.  Only  a  dumb  nation 
could  fail  to  transmit  its  virtues  in  speech;  but  it 
is  not  difficult  to  imagine  a  nation  of  individuals 
strong  in  excellent  qualities,  which  nevertheless 
would  lack  morale.  China  perhaps  is  such  a 
nation.  This  is  no  paradox.  The  private  vir- 
tues become  morale  only  when  they  become  public 
virtues  also. 

104 


ON  MORALE  105 

One  of  the  lessons  that  practical  politics  and 
the  experiences  of  war  time  both  teach,  is  that  no 
man  is  known  until  he  is  estimated  in  both  his 
private  and  his  public  capacity;  by  his  character 
and  by  his  acts  as  an  individual ;  by  his  policy  and 
by  his  influence  in  the  state.  We  have  all  known 
admirable  political  "  bosses  "  who  nevertheless  dis- 
tinctly did  not  stiffen  the  morale  of  the  life  of  their 
cities.  And  there  have  been  many  men  of  the  best 
brains,  the  finest  courage,  the  highest  organizing 
ability,  in  Europe  and  out  of  it  in  the  past  five 
years,  whose  influence  upon  the  morale  of  the  na- 
tions has  been  distinctly  bad.  It  would  be  easy  to 
name  them. 

The  reverse  is  also  true,  where  the  great  figure 
who  symbolizes  and  strengthens  the  desires  of  a  race 
lacks  the  private  capacities  which  alone  can  enable 
him  to  bring  about  their  accomplishment.  Lord 
Kitchener  seems  to  have  been  such  a  figure.  One 
might  say  that  for  a  little  while  this  "  organizer 
of  victory "  was  the  morale  of  England.  He 
could  not  organize  victory.  The  task  was  too 
great  for  him;  although  as  a  symbol  of  hope,  as 
morale  incarnate,  he  accomplished  as  much  as 
could  be  demanded  of  a  single  man. 

It  is  the  lack  of  public  virtues  —  what  might  be 
called  the  Chinese  danger  —  that  America  needs 
chiefly  to  consider.  Our  individual  powers  were 
high,  our  national  morale  low  before  the  spring  of 
1917.  The  wires  transmitting  the  energy  of  pri- 
vate virtue  into  public  service  were  in  bad  condi- 
tion. Some  had  broken;  there  never  had  been 
enough  of  them;  many  were  short-circuited.     Let 


106  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

us  confess  now  how  thankful  we  were  to  see  the 
enormous  force  of  American  private  life  pour  into 
government  service  when  we  entered  the  war.  New 
wires  went  up  daily;  leaks  were  closed;  the  home 
dynamos  doubled  speed;  the  great  machine  re- 
sponded. But  I  have  an  uncomfortable  feeling, 
which  many  share,  that  the  great  renewal  of  pub- 
lic-spiritedness  of  1917  and  1918  partook  of  some 
of  the  characteristics  of  a  rush  order.  Too  much 
of  it  was  in  the  form  of  a  temporary  expedient, 
easy  to  tear  out,  which  will  come  down  of  its  own 
weight  if  it  is  not  made  permanent.  The  habit  of 
public  service  is  not  yet  formed  in  the  United 
States.  Unless  we  take  heed,  our  admirable  mo- 
rale will  become  like  our  great  exposition  buildings 
the  year  after  the  show  —  paint-flecked,  rickety, 
imstable. 

Moral  earnestness,  such  earnestness  as  led  us 
into  the  war,  and  kept  our  morale  high,  is  the 
best  asset  in  the  character  of  the  American  people, 
better  even  than  their  energy.  If  our  moral  ear- 
nestness can  remain  patriotic  in  peace  time  we  can 
be  assured  of  American  morale.  Then  it  will  no 
longer  be  necessary  to  consider  nervously  the  ex- 
ample of  the  Chinese  business  man  who  runs  his 
business  admirably  and  cares  nothing  for  his  coun- 
try or  the  welfare  of  his  race. 


SPES   UNICA 

I  have  never  seen  the  little  village  of  Seicheprey 
bj  daylight.  By  sunlight,  and  before  April  of 
1918,  it  may  have  been  one  of  those  communities  of 
rose-and-gray  houses  that  cling  like  lichens  to  the 
slopes  of  the  hills  of  Lorraine;  but  as  we  stole 
toward  it,  single  file,  in  the  gray  of  before  dawn, 
it  was  only  a  pile  of  obscure  and  tumbled  ruin  over 
which  soared  the  flares  of  the  German  line.  I 
should  not  have  known  I  was  entering  a  village  had 
not  my  eye  caught  the  dim  form  of  a  shattered 
human  figure  hung  aloft  by  the  roadside.  It  was 
a  broken  Christ  with  drooping  head,  on  a  broken 
cross.  Above  the  crown  of  thorns,  just  visible  to 
straining  eyes,  "  Spes  Unica  "  was  carved  in  the 
stone  —  Spes  Unica,  Christ,  the  only  hope. 

A  little  later  we  had  traversed  the  ruins,  viewed 
the  sunrise  down  a  dangerous  open  slope,  and  were 
in  the  tense  excitement  of  the  front-line  trenches, 
where  wallowing  shells  and  rifle-crackling  ended 
speculation.  But  again  and  again  it  has  come 
back  to  me,  as  like  sights  to  many,  the  broken 
107 


108  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

Christ,  alone  in  the  dead  and  ruined  village,  pro- 
claimed by  ancient  worshipers  so  confidently,  the 
sole  hope  of  all  the  world. 

Two  weeks  later,  indeed,  I  had  cause  to  think 
again  of  that  hopeless  cross.  Great  Bertha  had 
aroused  us  early  in  Paris  with  her  "  pooms,"  un- 
pleasantly near  and  abominably  frequent.  By 
noon,  when  I  left  for  a  mission  in  central  France, 
we  knew  that  the  May  oflfensive  had  begun.  At 
nine,  as  the  clear  twilight  of  the  plains  of  Beauce 
suffused  in  amethyst  the  gray  town  of  Chartres 
and  the  soaring  spires  of  the  cathedral,  I  fol- 
lowed a  stream  of  suppliants  through  the  royal 
porch. 

It  was  dusk  in  the  lower  spaces  of  the  great 
church,  but  sunset  in  the  vaults  above,  where  from 
the  blazing  windows  over  the  clerestory  austere 
figures  of  saints  and  patriarchs  looked  down  in 
radiance,  and  the  glorious  windows  of  the  west 
front  burned  sapphire  in  the  gloom.  A  boy's 
voice  lifted,  chanting  in  the  mass.  The  shrine  of 
the  Madonna  of  the  Column  pricked  into  the  ob- 
scurity its  hundred  points  of  light.  The  mass 
bell  rang.  Dusk  became  darkness.  Then,  silently 
as  they  had  come,  the  worshipers  streamed  out- 
ward, and  still  the  great  windows  burned  and 
shone,  dim,  awful  faces  strong  to  save,  jewel  lights 
reflecting  the  glories  of  the  thrones  of  Mary  and  of 


SPES  UNICA  109 

Christ.     Spes  Unica.     The  hope  of  a  nation  in 
sorrow  and  in  fear. 

But  the  hope  of  Chartres  can  never  be  to  us  what 
it  was  to  the  Middle  Ages.  It  is  not  shattered, 
like  the  broken  image  of  Christ,  for  Christianity 
does  not  shatter  even  in  apparent  ruin,  but  the 
great  cathedral,  with  all  it  typifies,  in  which  a  na- 
tion, singing  its  "  Miserere  "  or  "  Te  Deum,"  freed 
souls  from  sorrow  and  found  all  its  doubts  and 
yearnings  answered,  belongs  to  the  thirteenth  and 
not  to  the  twentieth  century.  What  was  reality 
has  become  a  symbol,  powerful  for  those  kneeling 
women  on  the  evening  of  the  great  offensive,  com- 
forting for  many,  but  answering  not  half  of  the 
problems  driven  upon  us  by  the  complexities  of 
modern  life.  When  Joan  of  Arc  saved  France 
they  sang  "  Te  Deum  "  in  Chartres  and  went  their 
ways.  We,  too,  sang  "  Te  Deum  "  when  the  Ger- 
mans crossed  the  line,  and  then  returned  to  our 
troubled  world,  troubled  unquestionably  by  those 
same  diseases  of  the  soul  that  Aquinas  understood ; 
troubled  also  by  a  hundred  things  not  in  his  phi- 
losophy, and  feverish  with  splendid  energies  be- 
yond the  wisdom  of  the  thirteenth  century  to  con- 
trol. There  must  be  some  universality  of  aroused 
feeling  and  liberated  thought  which  can  be  to  us 
what  the  cathedral  was  to  France.  We  must  have 
some  substitute  for  that  medieval  faith  whose  mon- 


110  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

uments,  some,  like  the  crucifix,  brutally  shattered, 
some  still  fair,  the  American  soldier  saw  on  every 
fighting-line,  by  each  rest-camp  and  landing-stage 
in  Flanders  or  in  France.  Is  there  a  common 
faith  to-day  that  expresses  the  moral  energies  and 
spiritual  desires  of  an  awkward  world? 

I  believe  that  there  is,  but,  whatever  may  be  the 
answer,  we  have  our  own  cathedral  to  raise,  and 
all  the  inspiration  and  hope  that  we  can  draw  from 
what  still  remains  true  for  us  of  medieval  Cathol- 
icism will  be  not  too  much  for  our  heartening. 
When  one  considers  what  questions,  moral,  mate- 
rial, and  spiritual,  have  been  raised  by  the  war  and 
must  be  satisfied  —  duties  to  the  state,  duties  to- 
ward backward  territories,  international  morality, 
race  jealousies,  the  elevation  and  education  of  the 
poor,  sex  adjustments  —  the  edifice  seems  more 
likely  to  be  an  ofllce-building  than  a  cathedral! 
However,  we  must  at  it.  The  Germans  have  been 
beaten  soundly ;  our  own  ideals  must  be  saved  not 
only  from  destruction  by  them  but  also  from  cor- 
ruption by  ourselves.  And  that  is  the  foundation 
only.  They  begged  of  you  in  France  not  to  talk 
of  the  war  lasting  three  years  more,  or  two,  even. 
They  would  endure,  but  it  was  easier  not  to  look 
forward  into  a  distressing  future.  "Say  that  it  wiU 
end  in  the  spring,  and,  when  spring  comes,  if  neces- 
sary we  shall  go  on."  They  asked  you  in  America 


SPES  UNICA  111 

to  talk  only  of  beating  the  Germans ;  but  let  us  be 
courageous  enough  to  realize  that  our  work  has 
been  only  well  begun  now  that  the  Grermans  are 
beaten.  We  have  still  the  edifice  of  a  new  world 
order  and  world  belief  to  raise,  and  the  greatest 
share  of  a  grave  responsibility  is  going  to  fall  upon 
America. 

I  do  not  believe  that  Americans  have  more  than 
courageously  guessed  at  the  importance  of  our  in- 
tervention in  European  affairs,  and  the  load  under 
which  we  have  thrust  our  strong  but  innocent 
shoulders.  The  war,  of  course,  would  have 
ended,  and  ended,  at  the  least,  unhappily,  save  for 
our  sudden  millions.  We  turned  the  scale  for  the 
Allies  ;  but  there  the  significance  of  our  stride  from 
isolation  into  the  center  of  the  European  stage 
only  began.  Great  Britain  is  the  only  historical 
parallel.  In  spite  of  Treitschke's  jealous  denials, 
historians  agree  that  Great  Britain  did  substan- 
tially save  Europe  from  French  domination  in  the 
Napoleonic  period;  and  it  is  certain  that  she 
emerged  from  1815  richer  than  any  other  country, 
more  powerful,  with  prestige  and  authority  upon 
all  shores  washed  by  the  sea.  And,  on  the  whole, 
Great  Britain  in  the  nineteenth  century  discharged 
her  world  obligations  honorably,  and  with  less 
material  selfishness  than  might  have  been  pre- 
dicted.    She  began  that  principle  of  trusteeship 


112  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

for  the  backward  and  the  barbarous  which,  if  it 
becomes  international,  will  enormously  reduce  the 
probability  of  future  wars.  Nevertheless,  Great 
Britain's  position  in  1815  was  less  dominating 
than  ours,  now  that  the  war  is  won,  and  less  re- 
sponsible. For  we  have  emerged  with  control  of 
the  economic  and  military  balance  of  power,  not 
of  Europe,  but  of  a  highly  organized  world.  We 
are  the  richest  nation;  we  are,  as  far  as  effective 
action  is  concerned,  the  most  populous  nation ;  we 
are  the  one  nation  in  the  world  which  entered  the 
war  with  a  definite  program  to  make  not  America, 
or  England,  or  Europe,  but  the  world,  a  safe  and 
decent  place  to  live  in. 

Returning  to  America  after  seven  months  in 
Europe,  I  found  this  country  fully  alive  to  the  ex- 
igencies of  war.  But  I  discovered  (perhaps  the 
fault  was  mine)  only  the  vaguest  realization  of  the 
decades  of  arduous  leadership  ahead  of  us.  Have 
our  schools  and  universities  learned  that  unless 
they  train  leaders  in  reconstruction,  in  social  prob- 
lems, in  political  management,  and  world  economy, 
our  "  bluff "  of  guiding  the  world  toward  a 
durable  peace  will  be  "  called,"  and  called  quickly  ? 
Have  our  business  men  realized  that  for  a  gener- 
ation at  least  the  private  interests  of  business  must 
be  subordinated  not  merely  to  the  state,  but  also 
to  the  welfare  of  the  world,  unless,  indeed,  we  pro- 


SPES  UNICA  113 

pose  to  let  the  disciplined  commerce  of  Germany 
(which  will  survive  her  armies)  wreck  the  program 
of  international  good  will  in  which  fate  has  made 
us  leaders?  For  if  the  commercial  interests  of 
Middle  Europe  and  the  East  must  choose  between 
efficient  German  organization  and  selfish  and  con- 
flicting trade  policies  among  the  English-speaking 
nations,  they  will  not  hesitate  long.  Are  we  pre- 
pared to  counter  Bolshevikism  by  education  and 
social  justice? 

I  cannot  discover  —  and  this  is  the  root  of  the 
whole  matter  —  more  than  a  faint  recognition  that 
unless  American  character  in  this  generation  is  as 
great  as  American  responsibility  and  opportunity, 
one  of  the  most  stupendous  disappointments  in  his- 
tory lies  ahead.  In  this  respect  we  are,  tempera- 
mentally, the  exact  opposite  of  the  Germans. 
They,  on  the  basis  of  industrial  and  intellectual 
efficiency  of  a  high  order,  easily  conceived  them- 
selves a  superior  people,  destined  to  dominate  and 
civilize  the  world.  But  their  moral  basis  was  too 
narrow,  their  civilization  too  mechanical,  their 
arrogance  too  overweening,  their  personal  supe- 
riority relative,  not  absolute.  For  they  were  as 
far  below  the  French  and  English  in  some  respects 
as  ahead  of  them  in  others.  The  Roman  and  the 
Greek  were  absolutely  superior  to  the  barbarians 
they  conquered.     Not  so  the  German,  who  earned 


114  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

barbarian  for  his  surname  before  his  Kvltur  had 
begun  to  demonstrate  its  unquestioned  power. 

We  Americans  are  not,  I  fear,  unboastful.  But 
when  the  Germans  rushed  in,  proclaiming  them- 
selves super-men,  we  are  content  with  the  sudden 
parade  of  our  resources  and  do  not  always  hear 
the  call  to  be  individually  greater  than  our  adver- 
saries. And  yet  the  events  of  1914-19  have  flung 
us  into  an  arena  where  we  find  ourselves  champions 
not  only  of  our  own  superiority,  but  of  the  best 
ideals  of  all  the  world.  "  E  Pluribus  Unum  "  is 
our  motto ;  and  yet  we  have  fought  for  the  many 
against  one ;  for  a  good  diversity  against  a  tyran- 
nical uniformity ;  for  a  many-colored  Europe 
against  a  German  gray ;  for  freedom  in  develop- 
ment against  tyranny  in  the  worst  of  all  senses, 
since  it  was  a  prospective  tyranny  of  mind  over 
mind. 

And  all  that  this  means  for  the  ordinary,  every- 
day, unheroic  American  we  do  not  yet  seem  to  un- 
derstand. Two  millions  of  men  in  France,  billions 
of  Liberty  Loans,  the  energies  of  the  nation  di- 
rected to  war,  was  a  heartening  answer  for  a  first 
call,  but  this  was  only  the  beginning.  The  real 
strain  will  come  upon  our  brains,  our  morale,  and, 
most  of  all,  our  character.  Russia  was  less  great 
than  her  reputation,  and  her  collapse  has  been  in 
measure  with  the  greatness  of  her  lost  opportunity. 
It  must  not  be  so  with  us. 


SPES  UNICA  115 

To  underestimate  the  difficulties  ahead,  to  say 
(as  did  Russia)  that  all  we  have  to  do  is  to  keep 
drawing  upon  our  unlimited  resources,  may  be 
medicine  for  the  weak,  but  is  perilously  near  to 
criminal  folly.  To  croak  calamity  is  also  foolish. 
Arthur  Henderson,  the  English  labor  leader,  when 
he  was  in  Russia  in  Kerensky's  day,  found,  so  he 
told  me,  that  the  members  of  the  capitalist  group 
one  and  all  were  reading  histories  of  the  French 
Revolution.  Support  Kerensky,  he  urged  them. 
What  is  the  use?  they  said.  It  is  all  in  this  his- 
tory. His  moderate  government  will  fail  inevi- 
tably and  give  place  to  a  radicalism  so  bad  that 
in  three  weeks  Russia  will  overthrow  it  and  we  shall 
come  to  power  again.  What  will  happen  to  you 
in  those  three  weeks?  he  asked  them.  But  rather 
than  speculate  upon  the  answer  they  (and  the  En- 
tente diplomats)  preferred  to  trust  to  historical 
analogy.  Kerensky  feU  some  months  before  his 
time,  the  soldiers  left  the  trenches,  and  the  great 
war,  which  was  nearly  over,  took  a  new  and  Ger- 
man impetus. 

Nor  is  there  a  historical  analogy  that  is  of  real 
value  in  our  case.  If  we  fail,  it  will  not  be  because 
of  present  incapacities.  Up  to  1918  the  Ameri- 
cans, so  all  Europe  judges,  have  shown  strength 
in  themselves,  leadership  in  their  President,  and 
energy  in  their  organization  surpassed  by  none. 


116  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

If  we  fail,  it  will  be  because  we  cannot  rise  higher, 
as  we  must,  to  meet  the  tide  of  difficulties,  because 
we  cannot  increase  our  moral  and  mental  strength 
in  a  world  that  will  be  sick  of  nerve  strain  and  dis- 
illusionment. What  is  our  Spes  Unica,  our  hope? 
I  believe  it  is  to  be  found,  and  found  in  abun- 
dance, in  the  new  moral  earnestness  for  which  the 
war  is  directly  responsible;  and  with  every  desire 
not  to  preach,  and  after  unusual  opportunities  to 
see  how  vital  was  the  need  of  food,  guns,  money, 
and  material  organization  of  every  kind  if  we  in- 
tended to  win  the  war,  I  say  that  morale,  which  for 
us  is  moral  earnestness,  was  the  great  hope  even  in 
1918  and  the  first  practical  necessity.  One  found 
such  earnestness  in  France ;  one  found  it  in  Great 
Britain  roused  to  dogged  intensity ;  one  found  it  in 
Ireland  in  curious  fanatic  extremity.  Raemaekers, 
the  cartoonist,  told  me  at  the  front  one  night  that 
he  hoped  HoUand  would  join  us  "  to  save  her  moral 
being."  But  here  in  America  it  is  backed  by  sim- 
plicity of  character,  a  consciousness  of  unexhausted 
strength,  and  by  such  energy  as  the  world  has 
scarcely  seen  since  the  days  of  the  Normans.  It 
is  a  vague  and  irregular  religion  in  comparison 
with  that  perfect  cult  of  the  cathedral,  which  was 
all  things  to  all  men,  and  had  an  answer  for  every 
problem  in  this  world  or  the  next.  It  is  less  com- 
plete, and  also  less  limited,  for  it  is  an  expression 


SPES  UNICA  117 

of  an  age  whose  possibilities  are  almost  unlimited. 
Christianity  is  at  the  base  of  it,  but  it  is  a  broader 
interpretation  of  Christianity  than  St.  Paul  gave, 
or  the  Middle  Ages  could  apply. 

Moral  earnestness,  and  not  the  mere  need  of 
self-defense,  carried  England  through  the  dark 
spring  of  1918.  I  talked  in  that  year  with  Eng- 
lish political  leaders  of  every  party.  Some  com- 
manded my  whole-hearted  respect;  others  were 
clearly  time-servers,  driven  by  events ;  some  repre- 
sented policies  I  distrust ;  and  yet  I  found  in  one 
and  aU  an  unexpected  conviction  that  what  Eng- 
land did  infinitely  mattered,  and  an  impressive  wil- 
lingness to  admit  responsibihties  beyond  their  own 
little  group,  to  America,  even  to  the  next  genera- 
tion in  Germany.  One  of  the  storm-centers  of 
English  public  opinion  was  Lord  Northcliffe.  He 
was  accused  by  some  of  having  no  principle,  and 
no  policies  not  subject  to  change  on  short  notice ; 
he  was  believed  by  many  to  exercise  an  irrespon- 
sible and  unscrupulous  influence  upon  public  opin- 
ion by  means  of  his  controlled  press.  And  yet  his 
worst  enemies  admitted  that  he  wanted  only  one 
thing,  and  that  was  to  win  the  war.  In  other 
words,  even  if  a  demagogue  and  a  none  too  reliable 
leader,  he  was  morally  earnest.  And  the  list, 
both  of  strong  and  weak,  could  have  been  indefi- 
nitely extended. 


118  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

In  America  it  is  clear  that  we  feel  this  moral 
earnestness  even  more  intensely  because  more 
simply,  more  naively,  if  you  will,  than  the  older 
nations.  Every  other  explanation  of  our  en- 
trance into  the  war  as  a  united  nation  breaks  down 
on  analysis.  We  thought  in  1916  (let  us  be  hon- 
est now  and  say  it)  that  the  days  of  '61,  when, 
North  and  South,  we  were  willing  to  fight  for  a 
principle,  had  gone  forever.  We  thought,  some 
of  us,  that  if  America  went  into  the  war  it  would 
be  upon  a  wave  of  frenzied  patriotism,  exactly 
equivalent  in  nature,  if  not  in  cause,  to  that  dis- 
eased nationalism  which  carried  Germany  through 
Belgium  in  1914.  We  thought,  many  of  us,  that 
if  we  stayed  out  of  the  war  it  would  be  because  we 
knew  on  which  side  our  bread  was  buttered,  and 
that  as  the  butter  grew  thicker  our  neutrality 
would  increase.  The  outcome  ruined  the  reputa- 
tion of  many  cynical  prophets.  German  threats 
and  German  submarines  were  inciting  incidents 
merely.  The  President,  voicing  the  time  spirit, 
quickened  our  moral  earnestness,  made  us  think 
and  feel  for  once  internationally,  and  the  rest  fol- 
lowed in  natural  sequence. 

It  is  easier,  however,  to  begin  than  to  carry  on ; 
it  is  always  easier  to  fight  than  to  organize  the 
fighting,  than  to  profit  from  its  results,  than  to 
reconstruct  after  destruction.      Are  we  earnest 


SPES  UNICA  119 

enotigh  to  live  up  to  our  obligations?  None  can 
answer  that  question.  But  the  reply  depends 
upon  factors  that  will  bear  discussion.  Have  we 
intelligence  enough?  Are  we  whole-hearted? 
Moral  earnestness  is  like  optimism ;  it  is  little  good 
unless  it  makes  good. 

Unintelligent  seemed  to  many  of  us  the  hysteri- 
cal appeals  to  think  only  of  military  problems 
until  the  war  was  won,  as  if  we  were  so  weak  that 
only  one  task  could  engage  our  energies  at  once. 
The  incredible  blunders  of  diplomacy  made  by  the 
Allies  in  Russia  and  Eastern  Europe  are  monu- 
ments to  this  kind  of  single-mindedness.  The 
neglect  of  social  unrest  in  Italy,  which,  save  for  the 
efforts  of  the  American  Red  Cross,  might  have 
taken  her  out  of  the  war;  the  feverish  assertions 
in  many  American  and  some  French  and  British 
papers  that  the  working-man  must  be  kept  in  his 
place,  are  sign-posts  pointing  ominously  ahead. 
If  we  have  not  intelligence  enough  to  realize  that 
the  industrial  system  of  the  world  before  the  war 
was  wrong  and  must  be  readjusted,  our  moral  ear- 
nestness will  never  prevent  economic  disintegration 
or  social  revolution.  England  deserves  great 
credit  for  her  practical  recognition  of  this  grim 
but  undoubted  fact.  Unintelligent,  also,  though 
earnest  enough,  often,  indeed,  immorally  earnest, 
are  the  passionate  attempts  of  leases  and  associ- 


120  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

ations  to  begin  the  game  of  commercial  grab  again 
for  ourselves  alone ;  and  if  camouflaged  as  revenge 
upon  Germany,  all  the  more  dangerous  to  our  mo- 
rale. We  have  seen  before  this  the  morally  earnest 
man  rooting  out  the  unbeliever,  so  that  he  could 
possess  his  vine  and  fig-tree,  and  the  portent  has 
never  been  auspicious  for  a  peaceful  world,  made 
fit  for  decent,  fair-minded  folk  to  live  in.  The 
**  patriot  "  who  calls  upon  us  to  forget  that  we 
fought  for  a  clean  and  durable  peace  while  we 
pledge  ourselves  to  ruin  our  enemies  after  the  war, 
is  as  dangerous  as  he  is  stupid.  He  urged  us  to 
drive  a  powerful  enemy  to  desperation  and  thus  to 
double  the  cost  of  our  victory  in  money  and  life; 
he  urges  us  now  to  arm  with  greed  and  vindictive- 
ness  instead  of  a  clean  conscience,  common  sense, 
and  an  earnest  conviction  that  more  than  our 
pocketbooks  are  to  profit.  It  is  true  intelligence 
that  distinguishes  between  this  foolish  fist-shaking 
and  the  steady,  ruthless  use  of  the  economic 
weapon  until  we  obtain  our  just  and  legitimate 
ends. 

But  the  greatest  need  of  a  nation  suddenly 
toppled  into  world  conflict  and  world  responsibil- 
ity like  ours,  is  whole-heartedness.  Our  sudden 
wave  of  earnestness  made  us  approach  whole- 
heartedness  for  the  first  time  in  generations ;  and 
we   shall   have   to    stay   so   if  we   are   to   stay 


SPES  UNICA  121 

earnest.  Italy  has  suffered  bitterly  from  a  lack 
of  this  quality,  socialist  quarreling  with  social- 
ist, "  Greater  Italians  "  with  non-annexationists. 
France,  on  the  other  hand,  has  achieved  her  mag- 
nificent morale  by  a  whole-heartedness  in  the  face 
of  visible  danger,  the  sound  of  guns,  the  bombs  by 
night,  the  pitiful  evacues  streaming  southward  day 
by  day.  Our  whole-heartedness,  like  England's, 
was  of  a  different  kind.  It  sprang  from  the  moral 
imagination.  We  helped  to  ward  off  death-blows 
from  others  before  we  ourselves  were  more  than 
buffeted.  We  toiled  and  suffered  and  were  greater 
than  ourselves,  when  we  could  have  lived,  for  a 
while,  very  comfortably,  and  left  it  to  our  sons  to 
square  accounts  with  Germany  and  the  world.  It 
is  going  to  be  hard  for  Americans  to  carry  on 
through  the  long  series  of  adjustments  into  which 
the  war  is  subsiding,  unless  their  earnestness  is 
whole-hearted.  Straight  backs  and  stiff  upper 
lips  are  going  to  be  needed  quite  as  much  as  "  hus- 
tlers," and  organizers;  and  an  earnest,  undivided 
public  opinion  most  of  all. 

It  is  by  "  gassing  "  public  opinion  that  the  pac- 
ifists, radical  socialists,  and  conscientious  objec- 
tors do  the  most  harm.  There  is  an  uneasy  feeling 
in  England,  and  here  also,  I  suspect,  that  the  news- 
paper condemnation  of  pacifists  as  unclean  and 
poisonous  animals  somehow  misses  the  point.  There 


122  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

are  so  many  other  animals  far  more  poisonous  and 
really  unclean ;  for  when  you  stop  saying  "  paci- 
fist "  and  begin  to  speak  of  John  Brown,  or  Mary 
Smith,  the  individual  often  proves  to  be  a  person 
active  in  good  services,  not  military,  to  the  state, 
and  likely  to  be  a  valuable  citizen  when  we  reach  a 
durable  peace ;  while  many  noisy  "  patriots  "  are 
none  too  useful  now,  and  likely  to  be  still  less  so 
later. 

Nevertheless,  the  professional  pacifist  seemed 
wrong  and  dangerous  to  all  of  us  who  believed 
that  the  war  had  to  be  made  conclusive.  The 
most  important  charge  against  him  was  not  that  he 
believed  the  war  should  be  ended  by  negotiation. 
There  he  might  conceivably  have  been  right, 
though  the  evidence  was  heavily  on  the  other  side. 
The  most  serious  charge  against  the  pacifist  has 
the  advantage  of  being  susceptible  of  proof.  He 
saps  our  moral  earnestness  by  doubting  its  sincer- 
ity.    He  attacks  whole-heartedness. 

Let  me  cite,  as  an  illustration,  a  typical  family 
which  represented  what  one  found  often  enough 
among  pacifist  and  semi-pacifist  groups  in  Eng- 
land, and,  I  have  no  doubt,  in  America  also.  The 
father  was  one  of  the  most  useful  citizens  in  Great 
Britain.  His  business,  which  was  the  building  of 
motor-trucks,  was  an  essential  industry,  and  was 
conducted  with  such  regard  for  the  new  conditions 


SPES  UNICA  123 

of  labor  that  increase  in  wages  and  output,  a  bet- 
ter working  environment,  and  reasonable  profits 
were  all  secured.  Furthermore,  he  had  served  with 
distinction  on  commissions  that  have  rearranged 
throughout  Great  Britain  the  economic  relations 
of  employer  and  employed.  He  did  not  believe  in 
war,  but  he  supported  this  one  as  the  lesser  of  two 
evils.  Whether  he  would  have  fought  if  called 
upon  I  do  not  know,  but  his  work  at  home  was 
worth  a  regiment  in  the  field.  The  oldest  son  had 
conscientious  objections  to  taking  life.  He  en- 
listed, however,  in  dangerous  relief  work  on  board 
the  trawlers,  was  wounded,  and  returned  to  his 
service.  The  next  son  passed  last  year  the  age  of 
enlistment.  He  shared  the  family  distrust  of  war, 
but  was  all  afire  with  the  necessity  of  downing  the 
Prussian  menace  by  force,  if  no  other  way  was 
open.  He  felt  that  his  duty  was  to  fight.  The 
mother,  a  fine  woman,  of  the  seed  of  the  martyrs, 
was  an  out-and-out  conscientious  objector.  War 
she  regarded  as  the  prime  evil.  The  attitude  of 
her  husband  and  older  son  she  condemned;  when 
her  younger  son  consented  to  fight,  her  heart  was 
seared.  At  home  she  was  active  in  good  works 
for  the  refugee  and  the  destitute  alien,  but  she 
could  not  talk  of  the  greater  issues  of  the  war  with- 
out bitterness  toward  her  family  and  a  fanatic  dis- 
trust of  her  countrymen. 


124  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

It  was  one  of  the  ablest,  most  unselfish,  most 
high-minded  families  in  England,  but  its  atmos- 
phere was  disturbing.  The  younger  son  I  was 
sorry  for.  His  youthful  enthusiasms  were  clouded. 
No  course  seemed  to  him  entirely  right.  He  was 
unhappy  fighting;  he  would  have  been  still  more 
unhappy  if  he  had  refused  to  fight.  The  mother  I 
criticize.  Her  moral  earnestness  was  too  narrow. 
In  a  struggle  where  every  force  for  good  in  the 
nation  was  called  upon,  she  denied  the  validity  of 
righteous  anger  that  employs  the  weapons  of  this 
world,  and  excluded  as  impure  the  splendid  cour- 
age and  devotion  and  sacrifice  of  the  thousands 
who  were  giving  their  lives  for  what  they  believed 
to  be  a  worthy  cause.     She  had  buried  her  talent. 

And  this  was  the  error  of  the  pacifists  in  gen- 
eral. They  should  have  been  with  us.  We  needed 
them  more  than  many  a  mechanical  invention  which 
has  been  hailed  as  an  ender  of  war.  We  needed 
their  moral  earnestness  to  keep  us  whole-hearted. 
But  they  refused  to  work  with  the  world  as  it  was ; 
they  doubted  all  sincerity  unless  it  was  their  own. 
Will  they  share  our  burdens  now?  Have  they 
learned  tolerance  from  the  war? 

Many  a  crippled  body  and  soul  wounded  or  be- 
reaved must  envy  the  perfect  whole-heartedness  of 
the  religion  of  the  cathedral,  and  many  will  rightly 
find  solace  there.     But  for  us  who  are  still  un- 


SPES  UNICA  125 

winged,  and  upon  whom  the  plain  duty  of  living  up 
to  our  responsibilities  after  the  war  most  heavily 
falls,  there  must  be  a  more  immediate  and  mundane 
hope.  Is  it  possible,  in  the  midst  of  such  a  flood 
of  writing  upon  political  and  military  devices  to 
convince  the  dazed  reader  that  our  trust  must  be  in 
intelligence  and  whole-heartedness,  that  these  lie 
behind  material  agencies  and  are  indispensable? 
If  he  will  not  believe  it,  then  it  is  useless  to  present 
the  Spes  Unica  of  the  shattered  cross  as  a  pathetic 
symbol  of  how  much  men  have  lost  of  their  ancient 
sureties,  and  the  moral  earnestness  of  an  aroused 
world  as  a  single  and  invaluable  hope. 

Our  leaders  and  the  fighters  in  the  war  were 
keenly  aware  of  this  elementary  truth,  although 
they  confessed  themselves  in  deed  more  often  than 
in  word.  French  politics  and  German  diplomacy 
fluctuated  with  the  morale  of  the  people  at  home. 
Generalship,  I  heard  a  chief  of  staff  at  the  front 
once  say,  is  three-quarters  a  knowledge  of  the 
mood,  the  condition,  and  the  character  of  your 
men.  For  a  week  I  traveled  the  British  front  with 
a  grizzled  major  of  a  Highland  regiment,  who  had 
been  in  the  game  since  1914.  We  lunched  one  day 
with  a  mingled  group  of  field  and  intelligence  offi- 
cers, a  Belgian  on  liaison  work,  and  a  visiting 
French  captain.  The  talk,  which  was  chiefly  upon 
specialties  beyond  the  range  of  war,  made  one  fact 


126  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

evident  —  the  world  of  civilian  life  was  more  inter- 
esting than  ever  before  to  these  men.  They  were 
passionately  desirous  to  get  back,  to  "  clean  up 
the  mess  "  there,  to  go  on  with  their  mounting, 
broken  careers. 

"  How  do  you  stay  so  keen  on  your  job  here.?  " 
I  asked  the  major  afterward,  "  when  you  are  more 
weary  of  war  than  they  are  at  home?  " 

He  flushed  a  little,  British  fashion.  "  Have  to 
clean  up  this  mess,  first,"  he  answered. 

A  week  later  a  fine  boy  stood  by  his  Nieuport 
on  the  American  front,  talking  to  me  before  a 
flight. 

"  I  don't  think  much  of  the  danger,"  he  said, 
"  though  I  don't  forget  it.  It's  hard  work  getting 
the  Hun.     There  isn't  time  to  think  of  dying." 

Suppose  they  had  not  felt  that  way,  what  would 
all  our  inventions,  our  Liberty  Loans,  our  supplies, 
have  amounted  to.^"  Or,  to  carry  it  further,  who 
would  have  invented,  raised,  and  transmitted? 
Russia  was  rich.  Russia,  with  all  her  weaknesses, 
had  a  sufficing  economic  system.  Russia  lost  her 
whole-heartedness  and  collapsed  like  a  balloon.  I 
have  seen  the  doubts,  difficulties,  strains,  and  abso- 
lute losses  of  war-time  in  Great  Britain,  Ireland, 
France,  and  the  front.  And  if  I  am  an  optimist  in- 
stead of  a  pessimist  or  a  cynic  as  regards  the  fu- 
ture, it  is  because  (if  I  may  borrow  a  word  usually 


SPES  UNICA  127 

given  to  the  enemy)  I  believe  in  the  efficiency  of  the 
moral  earnestness  I  have  watched  at  work  among 
our  Allies  and  in  America.  We,  especially,  must 
keep  ours  earnest,  keep  it  intelligent,  keep  it  whole- 
hearted. 


VI 

ON    THE    UNCOMMON    MAN 

It  begins  to  be  evident  that  we  gave  ourselves 
unnecessary  concern  over  human  nature.  The 
war  has  brought  forth  courage,  self-denial,  de- 
votion, and  the  sterner  moralities  from  all 
peoples  like  leaves  in  spring.  Courage  has  not 
been  taught,  and  self-denial  has  not  been  taught, 
and  devotion  to  ideals  has  not  been  a  subject  for 
curricula ;  the  most  backward  and  least  admirable 
countries  in  this  five  years'  struggle  have  poured 
them  forth  without  preparation.  The  common 
man  has  done  all  that  a  romantic  idealist 
could  have  asked  of  him,  and  often  more.  Mor- 
alists and  politicians  and  philosophers  can  take 
him  off  their  conscience  for  a  while.  He  has 
made  good.  Education  can  do  little  for  him 
except  to  make  him  uncommon. 

It  is  the  uncommon  man  who  has  failed.  He 
has  succeeded  best  when  he  has  thrown  into  the 
conflict  those  common  virtues  of  courage,  intel- 
ligence, self-sacrifice  shared  by  millions.  When 
he  tried  to  meet  an  abnormal  situation  by  un- 
common abilities  he  has  failed  in  an  appalling 
number  of  instances.  He  could  not  prevent  the 
war.  He  could  not  end  it  quickly.  He  failed 
in  emergencies  where  a  sounder  judgment,  a 
128 


ON  THE  UNCOMMON  MAN  129 

more  expert  knowledge,  a  richer  background 
would  have  made  the  difference  between  suc- 
cess and  failure.  Extraordinary  men  —  the 
Hoovers,  the  Wilsons,  the  Fochs,  the  Lloyd 
Georges  —  even  (for  a  while)  the  Ludendorfs  — 
succeeded ;  but  merely  uncommon  men  failed. 

And  the  reason  seems  to  be  that  there  were  not 
enough  of  them.  When  the  crisis  toppled  over 
well-trained  men,  when  as  officers  they  were  killed, 
or  as  executives  or  specialists  they  were  worn  out 
or  outgrown,  the  supply  began  to  fail.  In  Eng- 
land and  France  tliis  was  notable  in  1918.  Com- 
mon men,  strong  in  the  emotional  qualities  of 
human  nature,  were  recruited  to  take  their  places, 
often  successfully.  But  you  cannot  train  a  com- 
mon intellect  to  be  uncommon  in  a  fortnight.  The 
fault,  when  there  was  fault,  was  not  in  the  material, 
it  was  in  education. 

The  need  for  uncommon  men  will  grow  in  the 
immediate  future ;  it  cannot  lessen.  If  we  assume, 
as  we  well  may,  after  this  war,  that  the  child  of  the 
masses  has  latent  within  him  qualities  of  heroism, 
of  nobility,  of  dogged  persistency  equal  to  the  best 
and  hitherto  slighted ;  if  we  believe,  as  we  well  may, 
that  unless  his  heredity  is  vicious,  much,  at  least, 
can  be  made  of  him;  perhaps  we  shall  begin  to 
educate  with  the  conscious  purpose  of  making  all 
capable  minds  uncommon.  The  result  would  be 
interesting.  Hitherto  education  for  the  masses 
has  consisted  largely  of  training  the  common 
people  to  be  common ;  and  what  we  planned  we  got. 


TANKS 

Many  must  by  now  have  read  the  deservedly 
famous  chapter  in  Butler's  "  Erewhon "  on  the 
peril  of  machines.  The  inhabitants  of  Erewhon 
lived  happily  without  machinery,  and  why?  Be- 
cause it  became  apparent  to  their  philosophers 
that  from  intricate  machinery  to  engines  with  con- 
sciousness and  self-action  was  only  a  step.  Ma- 
chines could  already  do  many  things  better  than 
could  men;  a  little  more  development  and  they 
would  begin  to  think  for  themselves.  But  if  their 
mechanism  became  that  ingenious,  why  could  they 
not  be  made  to  breed  and  propagate !  Then  the 
machines  being  stronger  would  control  the  men! 
Frightened  by  this  thought,  the  prudent  Ere- 
whonians  abolished  machinery  in  its  medieval 
period. 

Butler  was  obviously  ironical;  but  the  Tank 
comes  near  to  bearing  out  his  literal  meaning. 
Are  Tanks  conscious?  If  you  should  meet  one 
sauntering  along  a  route  nationale  or  sliding  down 
a  side  hill  for  a  drink  of  petrol,  you  would  not 
swear  to  the  contrary.  Do  Tanks  think?  Feel  a 
Whippet  twirl  imder  your  feet,  right  and  left,  as 
130 


TANKS  ISl 

she  picks  her  road  across  trench  bays,  or  watch  a 
Mark  V  mount  and  jog  the  length  of  a  train  of 
flat  cars  until  he  finds  one  that  suits  him,  and  you 
can  almost  believe  it.  Do  Tanks  breed?  Well, 
at  least  there  are  male  Tanks  and  female  Tanks, 
and  to  all  appearances  offspring  seem  quite  as 
probable  as  with  elephants.  Have  Tanks  a  sense 
of  humor.?  Perhaps  not,  but  like  Falstaff  they 
are  a  cause  of  humor  in  others.  Five  new  Whip- 
pet Tanks,  with  their  machine  guns  jammed, 
chased  a  fat  German  major  down  a  long  hill  in 
France  one  morning  in  May,  their  eight  miles 
an  hour  just  equal  to  his  perspiring  best,  while  a 
regiment  of  Australians  at  the  top  collapsed  in 
laughter  and  forgot  to  fire.  I  should  like  to  ask 
that  German  (who  may  be  still  running)  whether 
Tanks  are  mere  machines. 

The  Mark  IV  Tank  is  a  slow  and  sullen  dino- 
saur. Four  miles  an  hour  is  his  limit.  Fre- 
quently, with  sponsons  taken  ojff,  and  armament 
removed,  he  mounts  a  platform  on  his  back  and 
carries  a  sixty-pounder  gun ;  or  hauls  a  sledge,  like 
an  ox  team,  to  pull  big  howitzers  over  shell  craters. 
The  Mark  V  is  the  next  step  upward  in  evolution. 
He  is  good  for  five  miles  an  hour,  has  made  nine, 
and  one  man  can  drive  him.  **  Him  "  is  not  ac- 
curate, for  if  his  weapons  are  machine  guns  instead 
of  two-inch  cannon,  "  her  "  is  the  proper  designa- 


132  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

tion.  When  I  climbed  down  into  the  hot  and 
whirring  middle  of  a  Mark  V,  heard  the  gears 
squeal  and  roar,  and  saw  through  the  eye-slits  the 
ground  swinging  under  us,  I  knew  how  a  steam 
roller  might  feel  in  a  briar  patch.  Nothing  could 
stop  our  many  ton,  hundred  and  fifty  horse  power. 
We  came  to  a  trench,  swung  up,  so  easily,  and 
down  with  scarcely  a  quiver,  and  so  on  about  our 
business.  And  if  the  trench  had  been  wider  .J* 
Why  then,  there  are  "  tadpole  tails  "  provided, 
which  hook  behind  and  serve  for  leverage. 

But  the  Mark  V  is  a  ponderous  invention.  It 
was  with  the  Whippet  that  imagination  touched 
the  Tanks.  The  Whippet  —  so  named  I  suppose 
from  the  speedy  dog  which  chases  rabbits  to  earth 
—  is  the  pacing  dromedary  of  Tankdom.  She  is 
light  —  only  a  few  tons  I  should  guess  —  and  in- 
stead of  accommodating  man  Jonah-like  in  her  en- 
trails, carries  a  cab  like  a  camel's  hump,  from 
which  one  can  look,  sometimes  perpendicularly,  be- 
hind. The  Whippet  has  two  engines,  one  for  each 
of  her  paw  series,  and  that  accounts  for  her  eccen- 
tric motion.  As  she  runs  her  eight,  ten,  up  to  a 
conceivable  twenty  miles,  an  hour,  she  squeals 
raucously.  At  a  rock  or  a  stump  —  both  bad  for 
Tanks,  which  can  be  "  hung  up  "  on  their  "  bel- 
lies "  —  she  whirls  with  unbelievable  rapidity  till 
your  eyes  are  looking  one  way  and  your  stomach 


TANKS  133 

another.  Then  she  rumbles  gaily  over  the  field 
seeking  for  trees  under  twelve  inches  through  to 
practise  on,  sees  a  trench,  rises  on  her  hind  quar- 
ters, drops  below  sky-line  with  a  teeth-shaking 
bump,  grips  the  further  bank,  rolls  up  screaming, 
and  charges  off  for  more. 

A  bank  attracts  her.  She  noses  it  until  she  finds 
an  angle  not  quite,  but  almost  perpendicular,  and 
sticking  her  nails  in  the  sod,  worms  up,  while  you 
cling  to  the  machine-gun,  and  look  at  grass  which 
is  both  back  of  and  below  you.  And  as  she  goes 
she  spits  oil,  blows  dust,  and  flattens  the  world 
behind  her.  If  an  enemy,  you  may  escape  her  by 
lying  on  the  bottom  of  a  trench;  you  can  smash 
her  with  a  shell  if  you  can  catch  her  on  the  wing, 
which  is  not  easy ;  but  the  preferable  place  with  a 
Whippet  is  on  top.  Never  was  devised  a  more 
dangerous,  humorous,  human  engine  of  warfare 
than  this.  Indeed,  it  is  not  Tank  tactics,  which 
are  not  yet  publishable,  but  Tank  humanity,  that 
is  the  subject  of  this  writing. 

I  was  several  times  a  guest  at  "  Tanks,"  the 
name  applied  not  only  to  the  great  repair  station 
and  depot,  headquarters  of  the  Tank  Corps,  but 
also  to  the  quiet  chateau  with  its  admirable  seven- 
teenth-century porch  where  the  young  general  of 
Tanks  (Orpen's  picture  shows  his  energy  and 
power)  and  his  active  staff  are  quartered.     Our 


134  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

talk  ranged  through  and  about  and  above  Tank 
tactics  and  on  into  England  and  the  psychology 
of  the  races  at  war ;  but  it  came  back  and  back  to 
the  raison  d'etre  of  the  Tank.  "  The  business  of 
the  Tank,"  he  said,  "  is  to  meet  and  master  the 
machine-gun  so  that  infantry  can  carry  on  fur- 
ther; and  in  this  its  use  has  but  just  begun.  Its 
object  is  to  save  men." 

There  you  have  it.  Tanks  are  not  simply  de- 
structive machines,  like  rifles  or  howitzers,  they  are 
substitutes  for  men.  And  indeed,  they  are  organ- 
ized like  cavalrymen  in  brigades,  sections,  com- 
panies, each  with  so  many  Tanks.  For  all  I  know 
there  may  be  Tank  corporals  and  Tank  sergeants, 
distinguished  by  chevrons  painted  on  their  spon- 
sons.  I  saw,  in  fact,  wounded  Tanks,  bruised  or 
broken  at  Cambrai  and  elsewhere,  with  ribs  stove 
in,  elbows  shot  away,  or  fractures  over  the  eye- 
slits.  Some  were  in  shop-hospitals;  some  in  the 
convalescent-yard  waiting  to  be  repainted;  some 
had  been  discharged  as  no  longer  fit  for  active 
service,  and  were  crawling  about  with  petrol  ra- 
tions for  the  able-bodied.  And  most  had  names. 
You  would  never,  of  course,  expect  to  call  a  Tank 
by  a  number,  like  a  U-boat.  Bucephalus,  I  re- 
member, was  a  particularly  fit  Mark  V.  Many  of 
the  older  fellows,  in  addition,  had  messages  painted 
or  chalked  on  their  sides  by  their  friends,  the 


TANKS  135 

"  Tommies,"  as  if  in  eager  endeavor  to  enter  into 
communication  with  a  kindred  spirit.  "  Go  for 
'em,  old  girl !  "  "  On  to  Berlin !  "  —  and,  more 
poetically,  "  RoU  on,  thou  dark  and  deep  blue 
monster,  roll !  " 

A  very  curious  relation  subsists  between  the 
Tommy  (or  his  equivalent,  the  poUu  or  the  dough- 
boy) and  the  Tank.  Humor  —  which  was  des- 
perately scarce  in  this  war  —  has  attached  itself 
almost  exclusively  to  him.  Both  have  been  ter- 
rible by  aU  civilized  standards,  including  their  own, 
in  action ;  both  have  endured  incredible  punishment 
in  defense;  and  yet  both  inspire  the  reflective  ob- 
server with  a  humorous  liking  and  a  desire  to 
laugh,  even  when  death  awaits  or  accompanies 
them.  Why?  An  answer  might  conceivably  be 
drawn  from  Bergson's  essay  on  laughter.  The 
Tommy  is  amusing  because  his  whimsical  humor  in 
a  situation  that  asks  for  seriousness  is  incongru- 
ous. The  Tank  is  amusing  because  its  ponderous 
imitation  of  life  in  actions  of  which  life  is  inca- 
pable, such  as  walking  over  forests  or  into  a  hail  of 
bullets,  is  also  incongruous  and  so  laughable.  But 
the  whole  truth  goes  deeper,  and  there  is  a  more 
fundamental  similarity  between  the  Tommy  and 
the  Tank  that  it  would  be  well  for  us  all  to  appre- 
hend. Both  in  a  sense  are  machines ;  neither  is  in 
his  own  control ;  each  is  a  mere  irresponsible  agent 


136  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

for  a  superior  will,  laboring  dangerously  at  the 
word  of  command. 

When  such  humble  agents  of  defense  or  offense 
belong  to  the  enemy,  it  is  interesting  to  note  that 
in  this  war,  irritation,  anger,  rage,  have  been 
aroused  not  so  much  against  them  as  against  the 
superior  minds  that  control  them.  Perhaps  this 
is  because  civilization  is  ageing  and  begins  to  see 
more  clearly.  We  may  loathe  the  U-boat  pirate 
and  all  his  ways,  but  our  righteous  anger  is  most 
mightily  reserved  for  the  men  who  first  taught  the 
philosophy  which  leads  to  spurlos  sinkings,  and 
then  organized  its  terrible  practice.  Instinctively 
we  feel  that  the  brute  is  not  so  bad  as  the  cynic 
who  makes  use  of  him.  This  is  not  unreasonable. 
Captured  sailors  from  German  submarines  have 
told  me  that  they  seldom  knew  what  was  going  on 
in  the  waters  above  or  beyond  them;  and  anyone 
who  has  been  in  a  submarine  can  see  how  readily 
this  may  be  true.  I  do  not  mean  that  they  are 
left  spotless  thereby ;  far  from  it ;  but  ultimate  re- 
sponsibility belongs  elsewhere.  So  even  with  the 
butchering  by  common  soldiers  in  the  invasion  of 
Belgium.  No  sane  man  will  ever  try  to  excuse 
them ;  yet  the  brains  that  worked  out  the  policy  of 
"  f rightfulness  "  are  more  truly  blood-guilty  than 
the  frantic  men  who  executed  it. 

So  again  with  those  shameful  German  women 


TANKS  1S7 

who,  by  lamentable  proof,  have  too  often  been  wan- 
tonly cruel  to  the  helpless  wounded  captured  from 
their  enemies.  For  it  shoxild  be  more  generally 
known  that  they  were  not  Red  Cross  nurses  in  our 
meaning  of  the  Red  Cross.  The  Red  Cross  among 
Germans  is  a  stolen  emblem.  Their  organization 
has  never  been  intended  to  alleviate  suffering 
wherever  found.  It  was  a  department  of  the  Ger- 
man army,  as  much  so  as  the  medical  corps,  whose 
first  duty  was  not  to  the  wounded,  not  even  to  the 
German  wounded,  but  to  the  "  effectives  "  on  the 
way  to  the  front.  When  this  is  known  the  action 
of  the  nurse  who  would  not  give  a  drink  of  water  to 
a  suffering  Tommy  becomes  at  least  a  comprehen- 
sible brutahty;  and  our  indignation  centers  upon 
a  government  that  so  perverted  the  meaning  of  the 
symbol  that  represents  Christianity  in  war. 

The  same  general  tendency,  but  fortunately  with 
very  different  accompaniments,  was  to  be  observed 
on  our  side  of  the  Western  front.  It  is  worthy  of 
curious  note  that  among  the  Allies  the  men,  with 
rare  exceptions,  were  given  unstinted  praise;  the 
officers,  or  the  staff,  or  the  politicians  at  home  got 
what  blame  was  going  about.  The  "  splendid 
British  soldier,"  the  "  heroic  poUu,"  and  now  "the 
magnificent  Americans  "  —  how  well  we  know  these 
phrases ;  and,  unlike  most  stereotypes  of  the  press, 
experience  at  the  front  more  and  more  convinced 


1S8  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

that  they  were  true.  There  was  humorous  exag- 
geration in  the  Australians'  comment,  that  they 
took  their  officers  along  for  mascots ;  and  danger- 
ous exaggeration,  for  the  bravest  men  are  slaugh- 
tered uselessly  without  trained  minds  to  conduct 
and  plan  for  them.  Nevertheless,  the  common 
soldiers  of  the  Allied  armies  have  unquestionably 
come  nearer  to  the  ideal  standard  of  the  modern 
warrior  than  the  many  kinds  of  experts  set  above 
them.  Plain  human  nature  was  easier  to  coach 
successfully  for  this  war  than  brains ;  and  when 
things  went  wrong,  it  was  the  directing  mind  that 
we  accused  of  failure. 

Here  lies  perhaps  the  explanation  of  our  curious 
attitude  toward  the  Tommy  and  the  Tank.  There 
is  something  very  fine  and  also  a  little  pathetic  in 
brave,  unthinking  manhood,  sticking  at  it,  getting 
wounded,  getting  killed,  but  sticking  at  it,  and 
ready  for  orders  after  hardships  incredible  to 
home-keeping  men.  Patriotism  helps  the  soldier 
of  course,  the  backing  of  the  crowd  steadies  him, 
fear  or  self-defense  are  strong  motives  —  but 
whether  he  is  fighting  with  a  definite  anger  felt 
throughout  his  moral  and  physical  being,  or  is  in 
the  war  just  because  he  couldn't  keep  out  and  fight- 
ing only  to  preserve  his  self-respect,  he  carries  on 
month  after  month,  year  after  year,  as  if  he  had 
been  born  for  nothing  else.     A  general's  error,  or 


TANKS  189 

the  enemy's  quick-seized  opportunity,  may  slaugh- 
ter him  by  masses ;  yet  if  he  is  triumphant  his  re- 
ward too,  by  the  nature  of  things,  can  seldom  be 
but  in  the  mass.  When  this  pawn  of  the  world's 
game  can  joke  in  a  gas  mask  and  make  faces  at 
the  shell  which  just  misses  his  abri,  we  laugh  ten- 
derly with  him,  feeling  love  and  perhaps  shame. 
For  he  cannot  make  war  unaided,  cannot  win  it 
without  direction,  cannot,  it  seems,  stop  when  he 
is  beaten ;  he  can  only  fight  on. 

And  now  observe  the  Tank.  It  also  presents 
the  same  spectacle  of  a  good  servant  doing  our 
will,  driving  through  mud  and  steel,  and  always 
ready  for  the  next  objective  until  ruined  and 
**  scrapped  "  by  the  wayside.  The  Tank  also, 
though  like  the  Tommy  it  bears  a  name,  is  only  an 
anonymous  agent  of  G.  H.  Q.  and  the  national 
leaders,  and  will  get  no  individual  credit.  We 
shall  always  read,  "  the  Tanks  division  success- 
fully prepared  the  way  for  attack,"  as  we  read 
"  the  Lancaster  Yeomen,"  or  the  "  102d  regiment 
of  the  Yankee  Division  performed  feats  of  unex- 
ampled valor."  And  when,  creaking  and  groan- 
ing, a  Whippet  whirls  on  her  stomach  to  show  how 
debonair  and  powerful  she  is  in  the  face  of  im- 
minent danger,  we  laugh  at  her  as  we  laugh  at  the 
poilu  when  he  jokes. 

The  truth  must  already  be  apparent.  The  Tank 


140  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

is  our  first  real  approach  to  the  mechanical  sol- 
dier —  the  soldier  without  blood  to  spill  and  nerves 
to  tear,  who  can  nevertheless  perform  the  inevi- 
table business  of  physical  collision  which  must 
come  if  human  will  set  against  human  will  finds  no 
better  means  of  settling  the  conflict.  The  Tank 
has  no  consciousness  to  extinguish  once  for  all, 
no  future  to  lose,  for  it  is  as  worthless  as  a  battle- 
ship except  for  war ;  the  Tank  alone  can  meet  the 
machine  gun  and  triumph,  like  the  armored  knight 
who  in  the  Middle  Ages  gathered  the  shafts  to  his 
bosom  and  conquered  in  spite  of  them.  William 
James  wrote  of  a  moral  substitute  for  war,  hoping 
by  hard  service  to  the  state  to  secure  for  man  the 
splendid  discipline,  the  self-sacrifice,  the  fighting 
emotion  of  war  without  its  unhappy  reactions. 
Here  is  a  mechanical  substitute  for  warring  man. 
In  the  period  of  the  Italian  Renaissance  warfare 
reached  such  a  pitch  of  science  that  the  mercenary 
generals  who  fought  for  Venice  or  Florence  could 
sometimes  calculate  the  probable  outcome,  and 
save  their  troops  the  hardships  of  battle.  Then 
Charles  the  Eighth  with  his  hordes  of  French  ama- 
teurs marched  into  Italy,  fought  without  regard 
to  probabilities,  and  changed  war  from  a  science 
to  a  rough-and-tumble  experiment.  Are  we  com- 
ing to  an  age  when  mechanisms  will  be  sent  from 
our  fortresses  to  fight  it  out  under  scientific  con- 


TANKS  141 

trol,  the  best  machines,  best  made,  best  handled,  to 
win?  War  will  scarcely  be  ended  that  way  — 
not  while  there  are  modern  Charles  the  Eighths  to 
spoil  the  game  by  loosing  some  new  fleet  of  super- 
airplanes  upon  hapless  civilians  behind  the  lines. 
But  the  Tank  is  a  first  step  toward  substituting 
steel  for  bodies  in  a  war  where  muscles  have  given 
place  to  high  explosives,  eyes  to  range  finders,  ears 
to  microphones,  noses  to  gas  signals,  legs  to  petrol, 
and  skulls  to  "  tin  helmets." 

It  is  hard  not  to  be  whimsical  in  mood  when  writ- 
ing of  Tanks,  and  yet  I  do  not  desire  to  be  whim- 
sical. Tanks  were  no  joke  for  the  Germans. 
Their  own  clumsy  contrivance,  built  in  imitation, 
proved  how  anxious  and  how  unable  they  were  to 
retort  effectively  in  kind.  And  that  we  should  be 
building  machines  to  take  the  place  of  men  is  no 
mere  romance  of  science  or  expedient  of  a  warfare 
where  "  cannon  fodder  "  has  risen  in  price.  For 
if  the  Tank  takes  the  place  of  many  conunon  sol- 
diers, then  many  common  soldiers  need  no  longer 
stay  common ! 

The  Germans  recognized  this  principle  in  their 
later  methods  of  attack.  Roughly  speaking,  and 
in  exact  accord  with  their  idea  of  the  value  of  life 
where  the  state  and  its  ambitions  are  concerned, 
they  divided  their  infantry  into  two  sorts.  There 
were    the    regiments    of    inferior    material,    true 


142  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

cannon  fodder,  which  could  be  pushed  in 
masses  against  the  enemy,  succeeding  often  by 
sheer  momentum,  in  spite  of  frightful  losses ;  and 
there  were  the  picked  men,  of  "  storm  troop  " 
grade,  armed  with  machine  guns,  able  to  hold  what 
was  taken,  and  each  worth  a  score  of  the  rifle- 
armed  rabble.  This  was  the  scheme  of  Prussian 
evolution  toward  super-war,  a  less  humane  and 
ultimately  a  less  effective  method  than  the  British 
invention.  Furthermore,  a  method  which  looked 
toward  a  Prussian  future  merely.  For  note  that 
men  and  machines  in  Prussian  eyes  had  the  same 
value,  or  rather,  that  men  by  proper  discipline 
could  be  made  as  valuable  as  machines.  The 
Prussian  mind  conceived  a  battering-ram  of  ple- 
beian, second-rate  flesh  (preferably  Social  Demo- 
crats, xinskilled  laborers,  and  the  like)  which  could 
be  crushed  in  assault  without  material  loss.  The 
Western  mind  imagined  the  Tank,  a  super-Tommy 
without  his  precious  vital  spark. 

It  is  easy  enough  to  see  where  the  Prussian  sys- 
tem, if  it  had  escaped  a  thorough  beating,  would 
have  led.  It  led  toward  the  modern  version  of  the 
slave  state,  where  the  masses  are  well  fed,  properly 
cared  for,  and,  within  definite  limits,  well  educated, 
so  that  when  the  need  arises  they  may  be  good  ma- 
chines, not  bad  ones.  Where  our  Tank  idea 
points  is  not  so  clear,  but  it  is  none  too  early  to  be- 


TANKS  14S 

gin  to  consider  what  it  may  mean  for  the  peace 
with  a  threat  of  new  wars,  which  is  the  best  we  can 
hope  from  the  future. 

If  it  is  possible  -y  ■  and  who  will  deny  it  —  that 
in  future  wars,  if  i  e  permit  them,  machines  will 
serve  as  infantry  aJ  id  cavalry ;  that  guns  will  be 
laid  and  fixed  by  me  chanical  means  from  some  safe 
place  in  the  rear;/ that  submarines  and  monitors 
will  operate  by  v  ave  lengths  sent  from  shore ;  if 
it  is  probable  t'iat  the  coming  world,  whether  in 
war  or  in  peace,  will  be  as  full  of  machinery,  of 
appliances,  electrical,  chemical,  mathematical,  as 
the  inside  of  a  submarine,  why  then  what  shall  we 
do  with  our  Tommy  in  the  meantime?  Shall  we 
keep  him  an  automaton,  whose  humor,  like  the 
Tanks,  is  pathetic  precisely  because  he  does  under- 
stand so  little  of  the  vast  forces  around  him,  forces 
as  far  as  the  moon  beyond  his  control?  Shall  we 
make  him  more  of  a  machine,  or  more  of  a  man? 
For  after  the  shaking-up  this  war  has  given  him, 
neither  he  nor  his  children  will  stand  still. 

If  it  is  more  of  a  man  that  we  wish  to  make  him, 
a  man  competent  to  control  machinery  because  he 
understands  it,  and  able  to  guide  it  because  he 
can  think  out  how  and  where  and  why  it  is  to 
be  used,  then  we  must  educate  him.  Not  half- 
heartedly as  we  have  done,  but  as  the  Greeks  would 
have  educated  him,  as  seemingly  they  did  educate 


144  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

even  their  slaves,  by  contact  and  practice  with  the 
best  of  the  technical  processes  he  will  have  to  fol- 
low ;  by  absorption  of  the  best  ideas  as  to  the  rela- 
tion of  his  work  to  his  life.  The  first  means  tech- 
nical education  raised  to  an  excellence  which  we 
have  not  yet  given  it,  and  broadened  to  cover  all 
the  processes  necessary  or  useful  for  the  preserva- 
tion of  life.  There  will  be  less  and  less  place  for 
unskilled  labor  and  unskilled  fighters  among  civ- 
ilized men ;  machines  will  be  the  unskilled  laborers ; 
and  if  your  common  soldier  of  to-day  is  left  tech- 
nically illiterate,  he  will  sink  to  their  level. 

Nothing,  however,  has  been  made  clearer  by  this 
present  conflict  than  that  even  in  war  the  man  with 
a  narrowly  specialized  education  may  be  a  greater 
danger  to  the  world  than  the  most  unskilled  of 
peasants.  The  Prussians  have  pursued  in  their 
lower  schools  an  education  that  has  specialized  for 
the  conduct  of  a  war  by  weapons,  social  and  eco- 
nomic as  well  as  technical  and  military.  They  have 
been  better  educated  in  this  respect  than  any  other 
race.  And  yet  they  did  not  know  (neither  leaders 
nor  followers)  that  the  invasion  of  Belgium  would 
arouse  immitigable  waves  of  righteous  anger  and 
responsive  force ;  they  did  not  understand  the  mind 
of  the  rest  of  civilization ;  they  did  not  know  that 
technical  efficiency  is  not  a  substitute  for  a  knowl- 
edge of  human  nature. 

We  cannot,  it  would  be  madness,  give  the  worker 


TANKS  145 

and  the  soldier  of  the  future  a  merely  technical 
education.  Give  him  power  over  the  machine  with- 
out wisdom  to  direct  it  —  why  that  is  precisely 
what  is  the  matter  with  this  poor  world  today ! 
It  would  be  better  to  restrict  to  the  minimum  edu- 
cation for  the  masses  —  as  I  heard  the  manager  of 
a  famous  but  none  too  liberal  manufacturing  plant 
suggest  recently  —  and  so  guarantee  a  supply  of 
hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water !  This  would 
be  the  safer  alternative.  Jealousy,  fear,  the  de- 
sire of  domination,  which,  in  Homer's  day,  led  to 
blows  between  champions,  and  in  Shakespeare's 
brought  little  armies  to  cut  and  slice  at  each  other 
with  the  sword,  now  discharge  terror  and  death, 
multiplied  a  hundred  times  by  the  power  of  science, 
upon  millions,  combatants  and  non-combatants 
ahke.  We  as  a  community  (and  when  I  write  of 
the  common  soldier  I  write  of  course  of  the  com- 
munity) control  ourselves  a  little  better,  but  not 
much  better  than  the  Myrmidons  or  the  Elizabeth- 
ans ;  but  when  we  lose  our  heads  the  results  are  out 
of  all  proportion.  We  have  stolen  the  thunder- 
bolt of  Zeus  without  becoming  Zeus. 

Reluctantly  one  comes  to  a  conclusion  which  has 
nothing  novel  about  it  except  its  present  necessity. 
We  must  not  only  plan  to  give,  but  really  give  the 
common  man  what  has  been  in  the  past  an  uncom- 
mon education.     He  must  have  in  addition  to 


146  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

technical  facility  the  power  to  criticize  his  ex- 
perience; he  must  have  that  freedom  of  thought 
of  which  Pericles  spoke  to  his  Athenians,  which 
makes  men  able  to  reflect  and  then  go  forward ;  he 
must  learn  to  see  himself  in  his  relation  to  his 
world.  Briefly,  the  soldier  must  get  what  history, 
literature,  social  science,  and  philosophy  can  give 
him.  This  is  no  program  of  Utopia.  It  will  be 
found  —  some  conservatives  may  be  surprised  to 
learn  —  in  the  schemes  for  education  in  demobili- 
zation already  drawn  up  and  put  in  partial  opera- 
tion by  the  military  authorities  of  Great  Britain, 
New  Zealand,  Canada,  and  the  United  States.  It 
is  implied  in  the  remarkable  worJ^  of  the  British 
Board  of  Education  which  supplied  books  free  on 
any  subject  to  prisoners  of  war.  But  the  in- 
tensity of  the  need  of  a  broader  horizon  for  us  all, 
and  the  vast  difficulty  of  accomplishing  one-half 
that  must  be  done,  can  be  expressed  in  no  pro- 
gram, but  only  in  a  rebirth  of  our  whole  educa- 
tional system. 

And  here  lies  the  vast  potential  difference  be- 
tween the  man  and  the  Tank.  The  personality  we 
have  lent  those  lumbering  chariots  —  their  humor, 
their  perseverance,  their  implacable  obstinacy  in 
danger  —  is  all  borrowed  of  course,  borrowed  from 
their  companions  who  with  bayonets  set  run  behind 
them.     They  can  never  be  more  manlike ;  they  can 


TANKS  147 

only  be  better  machines,  better  armed,  better  pro- 
tected, more  speedy,  more  effective  in  crushing 
ramparts  and  guns  and  men.  And  the  more 
highly  specialized  they  become  for  warfare,  the 
further  removed  they  must  be  from  that  agricul- 
tural ancestor  who  crawls  in  Texas  or  Louisiana, 
the  more  worthless  for  any  purpose  whatsoever 
save  military  offense. 

It  is  not  so  with  the  Tommy,  the  poUu,  and  the 
doughboy,  those  humorous  fellows  we  speak  of  with 
a  loving  yet  patronizing  admiration,  who  hold 
nevertheless  the  future  in  their  hands  more  surely 
than  ever  Caesar  or  Napoleon ;  who  are  democracy 
and  will  control  it.  You  can  make  a  mechanical 
specialty  of  the  common  soldier  also.  You  can 
train  his  mind  to  act  with  machine-like  regularity 
in  the  execution  of  aU  orders,  whether  in  peace  or 
war,  and  you  can  put  his  body  also  in  absolute  con- 
trol ;  you  can,  if  you  will,  so  great  are  the  resources 
of  the  modern  state,  make  him  Prussian ;  and  what 
have  you  —  a  million  machines  which  suffer,  breed, 
and  blindly  destroy  at  the  word  of  command !  A 
million  machines  that  will  break  against  a  truly 
intelligent  nation. 

Or  we  may  follow  a  different  course.  We  may 
borrow  and  transform  the  great,  though  misused, 
discovery  of  the  Prussian.  For  the  Prussian  has 
clearly  proved  that,  by  a  well-planned,  thoroughly 


148  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

conducted  system  of  elementary  education,  a  race 
may  be  bent  from  its  course  and  directed  along 
ways  prepared  for  it  toward  a  destiny  which  (in 
this  instance)  would  surely  have  been  attained  if 
it  had  not  countered  the  will  of  the  world.  We 
may  borrow  the  discovery,  not  imitating  the  prac- 
tice, and  give  our  democracy  skill  where  they  lack 
it,  breadth  where  they  need  it,  and  that  power  over 
life  which  can  be  sustained,  if  not  created,  only  by 
freely  moving  thought.  We  can  devise  no  Utopia, 
but  we  can  make  such  an  effect  upon  our  democ- 
racy by  real  education  as  no  one  before  the  ex- 
ample of  Prussia  would  have  dared  to  prophesy; 
and  it  can  be  done  in  a  generation.  We  can  — 
thanks  to  the  development  of  machinery  —  make 
the  best  soldiers  that  way  —  for  the  best  soldier 
for  modern  war,  so  all  agree,  is  the  most  intelli- 
gent. We  can  in  such  a  fashion,  and  in  no  other  — 
and  this  is  by  aU  odds  the  most  important  impli- 
cation —  develop  in  a  generation  a  community  of 
able  fighters  whose  group  intelligence  is  great 
enough  to  substitute  international  law  for  war. 

Universal  education!  How  curious  to  be  still 
sounding  that  old  slogan,  whose  cause,  it  seemed, 
had  long  ago  been  won.  Won !  We  have  scarcely 
grappled  with  it.  The  means  of  education  have 
hardly  passed  beyond  the  stage  of  classification. 
We  are  in  the  text-book  stage  still.     Nine-tenths 


TANKS  149 

of  our  education  remains  in  life  itself,  where  it  be- 
longs, but  unorganized,  unapplied,  often  dis- 
trusted by  the  high  priests  of  school  and  col- 
lege. The  Athenians  of  the  fifth  century  with  no 
schools  at  all  did  better  than  we  do,  with  all  our 
enormous  mechanism.  And  the  one- tenth  that  we 
have  captured  and  codified  in  books  and  labora- 
tories has  had  the  joy  and  the  vigor  and  the  per- 
sonality squeezed  out  of  it,  like  a  rubber  sponge. 
War,  as  Thucydides  said,  educates  by  violence. 
Such  violence  has  been  necessary  to  prove  to  some 
of  us,  by  the  wasteful  rigors  of  conflict,  how  little 
our  education  was  related  to  life,  and,  what  is  even 
more  important,  how  little  our  hfe  was  related  to 
education.  There  is  no  limit  to  what  we  can  do 
for  the  pliant,  persistent  human  nature  which  this 
war  has  shown  that  the  least  intellectual  among  us 
may  possess. 

We  have  but  lightly  grasped  the  means  of  edu- 
cation ;  and  we  have  but  dimly  seen  its  end.  Is  it 
not  self-evident  now,  that  the  democracy  which  is 
to  rule  us  must  have  the  best  instruction  that  it 
can  take  and  that  modern  civilization  offers?  Is 
it  possible  any  longer  to  think  of  genuine  universal 
education  merely  as  "  a  good  thing,"  as  philan- 
thropy, as  an  aid  perhaps  to  good  government? 
Is  it  not  the  only  possible  insurance  against  world 
disaster?     Those  who  doubt  have  little  knowledge 


160  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

of  what  is  going  on  around  and  beneath  them. 
Heaven  knows  we  have  cause  enough  now  to  realize 
the  importance  of  the  economic  factor  in  its  effect 
upon  history.  We  have  reason  enough  to  take 
seriously  the  adjustment  of  population  to  food 
supply,  and  the  flow  and  distribution  of  wealth. 
But  in  the  readjustments  of  all  questions  affecting 
the  feeding,  the  clothing,  and  the  enriching  of  man, 
let  us  not  lose  sight  of  one  salient  principle :  if  no 
one  can  be  wise  long  on  an  empty  stomach,  so  also 
no  one  can  travel  far,  even  on  a  full  stomach,  with- 
out wisdom.  We  have  invented  machinery  without 
learning  to  control  it.  Let  us  not  invent  (or  suf- 
fer) new  distributions  of  power  without  providing 
an  effective  education  in  its  use  and  enjoyment. 

We  devised  the  Tank  and  sent  it  upon  its  way  re- 
joicing to  the  discomfiture  of  our  enemies.  It  is 
harder  to  devise  a  new  and  improved  man,  but  quite 
as  possible.  We  cannot  give  him  religion,  which 
he  clearly  is  seeking,  we  cannot  give  him  a  loving 
heart,  we  cannot  give  him  courage  if  he  does  not 
possess  it,  we  cannot  give  him  strength  of  intel- 
lect, we  cannot  give  him  instinctive  morality.  But 
a  well-trained  mind,  and  well-trained  muscles,  and 
a  fairly  sound  body  we  can  give  him  in  nine  cases 
out  of  ten  —  even  the  Chinese  coolies  on  the  Brit- 
ish front  have  been  taught  to  build  complex  ma- 
chinery ;  and  a  sense  of  his  place  in  the  world,  eco- 


TANKS  151 

nomic,  social,  ethical,  historical  we  can  give  him; 
and  also  in  some  measure  the  power  of  independent 
thought.  The  object  of  the  Tank  and  all  me- 
chanical contrivances  is  to  save  life,  to  save  life 
in  order  that  in  the  future  men  shall  be  men  and 
not  machines. 


VII 

ON  THE  PERSONAL   IN   EDUCATION 

A  flippant  reviewer  remarked  upon  "  The  Edu- 
cation of  Henry  Adams,"  that  only  a  Bostonian 
would  spend  a  lifetime  in  trying  to  discover  how  to 
educate  himself  for  living.  The  criticism  gives  Bos- 
ton an  undeserved  singularity.  In  every  age  and 
every  civilization,  the  most  thoughtful  men  have 
been  precisely  the  least  dogmatic  when  they  have 
tried  to  define  education,  and  they  have  usually 
been  far  less  certain  in  middle  age  than  in  youth. 

The  difficulty  is  that  the  problems  of  education 
cannot  be  solved  by  the  arithmetic  that  suffices  for 
more  material  things.  The  study  of  literature 
may  be  useful  in  sweetening  the  mind  and  the  study 
of  mathematics  in  clearing  it ;  a  course  in  engineer- 
ing may  teach  how  to  build  bridges,  and  a  course 
in  law  how  to  wreck  railroads,  or  save  them;  but 
the  sum  of  all  that  is  taught  to  youth  must  be  more 
than  an  addition  of  the  formal  subjects  he  is  learn- 
ing. Whatever  power  or  profession  this  course 
or  that  may  teach,  education  as  a  whole  must  be 
for  living.  The  boy  has  to  learn  how  to  live ;  and 
unless  he  has  learned  he  is  not  fully  educated,  no 
matter  how  much  or  how  long  he  has  studied.  The 
greatest  scholars,  as  Chaucer  long  ago  remarked, 
are  not  always  the  wisest  men. 
152 


ON  THE  PERSONAL  IN  EDUCATION    153 

This  is  the  fatal  realization  that  smites  the  "  or- 
ganizer "  (if  organizers  are  ever  smitten!)  just 
as  his  scheme  of  studies  for  an  ideal  school  or  uni- 
versity is  complete.  His  is  a  noble  scheme,  but 
when  its  simplicity  is  compared  with  the  complex- 
ity of  life,  doubt  enters.  This,  he  may  say,  is  the 
proper  fashion  of  teaching  law,  but  will  this  course 
make  a  good  lawyer?  These  are  the  subjects  that 
every  college  graduate  should  learn,  but  will  this 
curriculum  make  a  good  college  graduate.?  It  is 
easier  to  make  scholars  than  men. 

There  is  only  one  way  out  of  the  difficulty,  and 
that  is  an  uncertain  and  expensive  one.  You  can- 
not put  all  education  into  text-books,  but  what 
cannot  be  extracted  and  codified  you  can  present 
in  its  container  —  the  educated  man.  You  can 
ask  a  teacher  to  teach  what  he  is  able,  and  to  be 
those  things  impossible  to  teach.  By  learning 
what  a  truly  educated  man  is,  and  how  he  thinks, 
and  sharing,  or  at  least  observing,  his  emotions, 
the  student  can  derive  by  imitation  or  repulsion 
(either  will  do  it)  a  balanced  ration  for  his  grow- 
ing mind,  which  never  can  be  fed  on  facts  alone,  or 
theories,  or  anything  that  can  be  put  into  a  college 
catalogue.  But  such  teachers  are  hard  to  get, 
and  they  should  be  expensive. 

This  is  the  defense  of  the  personal  relation  (and 
of  personality)  in  teaching.  And  it  is  the  con- 
demnation of  our  wholesale  methods  of  lecture  and 
text-book  and  recitation  in  America.  They  sup- 
ply, it  is  true,  the  protein.  But  they  leave  the 
carbohydrates  and  the  fats  of  life  to  chance  pur- 
veying.    This  is  why  "  the  playing  fields  of  Eton  " 


154  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

and  the  "  bowls  "  and  "  stadiums  "  of  America 
have  been  successful  in  the  limited  but  well-bal- 
anced and  highly  personal  education  they  provide, 
while  the  classroom  and  study  have  so  often  failed 
in  the  broader  and  more  important  field  of  training 
the  intellect  to  conquer  life  by  understanding  it. 


EDUCATION    BY    VIOLENCE 

Save  military  tactics,  there  was  nothing  more 
discussed  in  Europe  last  year  than  education.  The 
English  newspapers  quoted  from  Milton :  "  The 
reforming  of  education  is  one  of  the  greatest  and 
noblest  designs  that  can  be  thought  on,  for  by  the 
want  thereof  the  nation  perishes."  Public  speak- 
ers, whether  they  know  it  or  not,  spent  more  than 
half  their  energies  on  problems  of  instruction.  If 
I  were  asked  to  state  one  thing  that  men  from  the 
front  and  behind  the  front  said  they  had  learned 
from  the  war,  it  would  be  the  unsuspected  and  in- 
comparable importance  of  education. 

I  do  not  mean  education  in  any  formal,  text- 
book sense.  At  Aldershot  it  was  a  question  of 
making  soldiers.  At  Polder's  End  and  Barrow-in- 
Furness,  as  one  walked  through  row  after  row  of 
mob-capped  working-girls  turning  shells,  the  talk 
was  of  how  they  had  been  taught  to  work,  and  how 
the  employers  had  been  taught  to  teach  and  handle 
them.  At  Issoudun,  it  was  education  all  day  long 
in  vrilles  and  loops  and  the  co-operation  of  brain 
and  eye  in  obsen'ation.  On  the  New  Zealand 
front  I  lunched  within  sound  of  a  battery,  and, 
155 


156  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

eager  for  stories  of  the  enemy,  listened  to  the  gen- 
eral in  command  while  he  talked  education,  how 
that  remarkable  little  island  might  get  back 
trained  men  after  the  war. 

Everybody  was  either  learning  or  teaching  on 
the  front.  What  was  the  rehearsal  of  an  offensive 
but  concrete  education  in  tactics?  The  sanitary 
corps  never  made  its  rounds  without  teaching  care 
of  physique.  Back  and  back  again  the  conversa- 
tion came  to  the  morale  of  the  enemy,  his  training, 
bad  and  good ;  how  and  why  he  worked  harder  than 
we  did;  how  and  why  he  had  less  independence  of 
action,  less  judgment,  less  humanity ;  and  the 
answer  was  always,  education.  A  young  general 
of  the  old  army  said  at  lunch  one  day :  "  I  am  a 
'  mercenary  soldier,'  and  therefore  I  can't  believe, 
and  don't,  that  war  is  bad  for  character;  but  I 
would  not  have  military  training  for  a  whole  na- 
tion, except  in  time  of  war."  He  need  not  have 
made  concessions  to  the  civilian  present.  Educa- 
tion for  war-time  as  one  heard  it  explained  and 
speculated  upon  in  the  army  was  not  much  nar- 
rower than  the  reform  of  the  human  species,  mak- 
ing them  more  intelligent,  more  adaptable,  and 
more  capable  in  all  things  as  a  prerequisite  for 
waging  successful  war. 

In  England,  one-half  of  the  serious  discussions 
one  hears  I  should  classify  under  education.     I 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  157 

precisely  do  not  mean  that  London  in  war-time  was 
like  a  teachers'  association  with  its  gabble  of  meth- 
ods, courses,  and  text-books.  On  the  contrary, 
although  exposed  to  "  shop  "  of  this  nature  by  a 
university  connection,  I  heard  little  talk  of  formal 
education,  could  arouse  no  interest  in  "  the  college 
curriculum  after  the  war  "  and  such  favorite  sub- 
jects, found  it  difficult  to  get  a  clear  idea  of  just 
what  the  British  school  system  had  been  like,  such 
was  the  keenness  to  discuss  not  the  bones,  but  the 
blood  of  education.  And  yet  this  was  the  period 
of  the  fight  over  Mr.  Fisher's  education  bill,  so 
hotly  contested  that  even  the  war  yielded  front- 
page columns  now  and  then  in  its  favor.  This  was 
a  time  when  you  could  stir  any  Britisher  to  talk 
—  M.  P.,  soldier,  workman,  country  gentleman, 
superintendent,  I  tried  them  all  —  merely  by  the 
question,  "  What  is  going  to  happen  in  English 
education?  " 

No  wonder  they  are  interested.  Efficiency  — 
and  in  March  of  1918  England  saw  clearly  that 
she  must  be  efficient  or  starve  —  depends  upon  edu- 
cation. Propaganda  —  and  half  the  writing  done 
in  England  is  propaganda  —  is  a  form  of  educa- 
tion. The  next  generation  is  decimated  by  the 
war,  and  what  is  left  of  it  will  have  to  make  the 
greatest  profit  in  the  briefest  time,  from  education. 
Germany  had  set  the  nations   at   one   another's 


158  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

throats,  and  to  thoughtfiil  men  there  seems  no 
way  to  prevent  the  thing  from  happening  again 
except  by  better  (and  in  Germany's  case,  com- 
pulsory) education. 

I  am  not  (thank  Heavens)  writing  a  treatise  on 
education  after  the  war,  for  the  excellent  reason 
that  neither  I  nor  any  one  else  knows  the  terms 
upon  which  it  will  be  conducted.  But  one  cannot 
come  into  active  contact  with  hundreds  whose  ex- 
perience, often  bitter,  has  brought  them  a  new 
sense  of  values  without  at  least  an  enrichment  of 
opinion.  And  the  effect  upon  most  men  who  have 
taught  for  a  living  is  to  make  them  crack  open 
every  educational  idea  they  possess  to  see  whether 
it  holds  dust  or  moving  life  within  it.  England 
at  large  is  profoundly  dissatisfied  with  her  educa- 
tion ;  and  she  is  right  to  be  dissatisfied,  for  in  some 
respects  she  was  dragging  far  below  the  safety 
line.  The  crust  is  cracking  everywhere,  the  dust 
is  blowing  away,  new  blood  is  throbbing.  We 
shall  soon  be  profoundly  dissatisfied;  not  with 
entire  reason,  for,  after  all,  our  success  in  the  try- 
ing year  of  1918  is  a  success  for  American  educa- 
tion in  school  and  out  of  it.  But  when  we  begin  to 
realize  that  under  stress  a  boy  of  twenty  was  being 
taught  the  very  complex  business  of  modern  war 
in  a  quarter  of  the  time  we  allotted  to  less  difficult 
professions  of  peace,  we  are  bound  to  be  dissatis- 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  159 

fied  also.  We  are  bound  to  wonder  whether  we 
have  not  underestimated  American  capacity  for 
learning,  even  when  unstirred  by  a  grave  crisis. 
And  when  we  thoroughly  understand  that  propa- 
ganda (which  is  merely  expert  transmission  of 
ideas)  has  turned  the  heart  of  nations,  while  our 
formal  education  in  ideas,  historical,  philosophi- 
cal, or  economic,  has  often  sunk  only  skin  deep,  we 
are  sure  again  to  be  dissatisfied.  If  we  had  edu- 
cated as  well  before  this  war  as  we  educated  for 
waging  it,  there  might  never  have  been  one.  If 
we  educate  as  well  after  it  there  wiU  never  be  an- 
other ;  or,  if  there  is,  we  shall  win  it. 

This  is  an  essay  and  not  a  treatise,  and  I  shall 
be  more  than  content  to  say  as  simply  and  briefly 
as  possible  what  the  living  heart  of  education  seems 
to  some  of  us ;  what  England  has  had,  and  has, 
that  we  have  not ;  what  we  have  grasped  that  Eng- 
land is  still  seeking.  If  successful  war  is  largely  a 
question  of  national  education,  and  a  stable  peace 
is  also  to  depend  upon  education,  then  that  co- 
operation which  we  all  hope  to  see  among  English- 
speaking  countries  may  serve  us  almost  best 
through  mutual  education. 

There  is,  I  am  well  aware,  a  prevalent  belief  that 
Great  Britain  has  little  to  teach  us  in  education. 
It  is  known  that  her  lower  schools  are  good,  but 
probably  no  better  than  ours.     It  is  known  that 


160  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

her  "  public  schools,"  of  secondary  grade,  are  won- 
derfully effective  in  "  stamping  "  the  boys  that  go 
through  them,  but  narrow  and  rigid  in  what  they 
teach ;  that  there  is  no  wide-spread  system  of  sec- 
ondary education  for  everybody  such  as  our  high 
schools  afford.  It  is  known  that  British  univer- 
sities, while  still  famous  for  the  men  they  produce, 
are  irregular  in  their  excellences,  hampered  by  a 
medieval  organization,  and  distinctly  behind  in 
many  ranges  of  modern  thought  and  investigation. 
This  was  known,  and  this  is  measurably  true.  The 
Fisher  bill,  which  in  effect  establishes  compulsory 
high  schools  that  after  seven  years  will  keep  boys 
and  girls  in  school  until  eighteen,  seems  a  step  up 
to,  not  beyond,  America ;  and  one  hears  of  no  radi- 
cal, far-sweeping  changes  proposed  in  the  British 
universities. 

Why,  then,  in  the  stress  of  war  and  the  ap- 
proach of  reconstruction,  shoiild  we  be  interested 
in  British  education?  The  answer  is  to  be  found 
in  the  war  itself.  Many  nations  have  suffered 
more  than  Great  Britain ;  none  of  them  has  had  to 
make  such  a  universal  right-about  in  thought,  hab- 
its, purposes,  desires,  down  to  the  last  detail  of 
daily  life.  I  can  think  of  only  one  among  all  my 
acquaintances  under  sixty  years  of  age,  in  Eng- 
land, whose  daily  life  has  not  been  completely  up- 
set ajid  rebuilt  since  the  ws^r.     And  the  leaders  in 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  161 

this  revolution  have  been  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten 
the  products  of  the  most  British  part  of  British 
education  —  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  the  public 
schools,  the  circles  of  the  Workmen's  Educational 
Association.  We  thought  that  our  own  college 
system  was  decadent  until  the  war  revealed  what 
fine  fellows  it  was  sending,  in  spite  of  its  faults,  to 
a  business  world  that  was,  perhaps,  too  self-cen- 
tered to  appreciate  them.  And  the  education  that 
sent  forth  the  dead  tens  of  thousands  who  led  the 
way  for  England  is  not  a  failure.  Neither  has  it 
succeeded  because  of  its  faults. 

The  enduring  strength  of  British  education  is 
its  practical  grasp  of  the  principle  that  nothing 
matters  half  so  much  as  the  meeting  of  minds. 
There,  for  all  our  elaborate  systems  and  doors 
open  everywhere,  we  have  been  negligent.  Its 
weakness  is  an  exclusiveness,  half  purposeful,  half 
due  to  exigency  of  circumstance.  Here  much  is  to 
be  learned  from  America. 

I  think  that  my  first  clue  to  the  master  idea  of 
British  education  came  from  two  Scotchmen,  mu- 
nition-workers now,  but  one-time  educational  ex- 
perts, who  simply  would  not  talk  about  "  the  cur- 
riculum." It  was  not  that  they  did  not  know ;  of 
course  they  knew ;  but  every  question  aroused  some 
problem  in  teaching  or  research  that  interested 
them  far  more  than  the  typical  schedule  of  the 
u 


162  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

British  school.  It  was  weeks  before  I  succeeded  In 
pinning  down  an  authority  to  a  statement  of  just 
what  the  British  school  did  teach,  and  then  I  got 
it  in  printed  form,  and  found  that,  when  all  had 
been  said,  what  was  taught  depended  chiefly  upon 
what  the  school  wanted  —  a  scandalous  situation, 
as  any  well-regulated  American  would  testify.  In 
Oxford,  in  Cambridge,  in  Manchester  and  Edin- 
burgh, in  the  London  schools,  and  in  the  training- 
camps,  in  the  commencing  khaki  university  behind 
the  lines,  the  same  thing  always  happened.  I  came 
away  from  each  investigation  with  a  sense  of  hav- 
ing talked  vitally  on  education  and  with  few 
*'  facts  "  to  put  into  my  notes.  It  was  all  humor- 
ously different  from  many  a  school  and  college 
convention  I  have  left  in  America  with  a  bag 
leaking  syllabi  and  prospectuses  all  the  way  home. 
There  is  a  close  connection,  of  course,  between 
this  British  planlessness  and  the  lack  of  theoretical 
science  so  evident  in  England  at  the  beginning  of 
the  war  and  the  inferiority  of  much  technical 
training  in  Great  Britain.  These  defects  must  be 
taken  care  of,  but  there  is  no  need  to  pause  for 
criticism.  The  bird  I  am  after  is  of  swifter  wing. 
It  is  the  secret  that  explains  (for  example)  why  a 
slack  college  with  an  eighteenth-century  equipment 
could  send  men  to  the  front,  who,  not  at  first,  but 
in  the  long  run,  proved  themselves  the  equals  in 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  163 

most  respects,  and  the  superiors  in  some,  to  the  far 
more  efficiently  trained  Germans.  It  is  the  ex- 
planation of  why  British  education,  with  all  its 
faults,  has  really  educated. 

The  answer  is  simple  enough,  and  I  shall  be 
merely  reiterating  in  stating  it,  but  this  answer 
has  a  new  significance  in  war-time,  and  especially 
for  us.  It  explains,  I  think,  why  it  is  hard  to  in- 
terest the  Englishman  in  problems  of  curriculum. 
Said  the  master  of  an  Oxford  college  (we  were 
talking  of  one  of  the  "  young  men  "  of  the  new 
England)  :  "  He  was  with  me  for  a  year.  One  of 
those  wide-reaching,  generalize-it-all  sort  of  minds. 
Would  write  ten  thousand  words  before  he  found 
the  fact  that  ought  to  have  come  first.  Never 
would  think  as  I  think ;  but  I  had  the  facts  and  he 
didn't.  I  gave  an  hour  a  day,  I  suppose,  for  a 
year.  Don't  agree  with  his  thinking  now;  but  it 
was  worth  while." 

"  What  was  he  studying.?  "  I  asked. 

"  Don't  remember,  exactly ;  history,  economics, 
I  suppose.  The  important  thing  was  his  mind. 
That  is  what  I  was  teaching." 

The  principle  here  is  evident.  It  is  the  living 
together  of  mature  and  immature  intellects;  it  is 
education  by  contact  or  by  meeting  of  minds ;  and 
it  is  worth  while.  Such  teaching  is  expensive ;  but 
is  expense  the  first  consideration  if  it  results  not 


164  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

in  subjects  partly  mastered,  but  the  power  to  mas- 
ter them  completely  —  in  wisdom  as  well  as  knowl- 
edge? Is  any  education  too  expensive  that  sinks 
deep? 

*'  Whatever  we  cannot  pay  for  is  too  expensive," 
the  American  taxpayer  answers,  "  and  we  cannot 
pay  enough  first-rate  minds  to  give  an  hour  a  day 
personally  to  all  who  seek  education."  Perhaps 
not,  and  perhaps  with  adjustment  to  existing  con- 
ditions, we  can  well  afford  it.  Let  that  point  wait ; 
it  is  the  principle  that  is  important,  and  this  I 
found  alive  throughout  the  British  schools  and  uni- 
versities, and  in  the  army,  whence  it  is  spreading 
to  ours.  It  would  be  a  curious  by-product  of  the 
war  if  it  should  come  to  us  through  education  in 
demobilization,  and  so  home  by  the  military  route. 
I  found  it  in  the  public  schools,  where  the  curricu- 
lum (often  with  good  reason)  was  secondary  to 
what  the  masters  judged  was  the  total  mind  of  the 
boy.  I  found  it  in  grammar-schools,  where  the 
discussion  was  always  of  what  the  youngster 
seemed  to  be  good  for  in  actual  life,  not  what  he 
had  learned.  I  heard  of  it  operating  in  the  in- 
ternment camp  at  Riihleben,  where  every  man  who 
knew  became  the  center  of  a  little  tutorial  group, 
each  member  of  which  afterward  formed  other 
groups  until  education  of  that  vital  kind  which 
comes  from  self-help  under  criticism  and  direction 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  165 

spread  throughout  the  curious  assemblage  of  all 
kinds  and  classes  imprisoned  together  because  they 
were  Britons. 

Can  such  personal  education  be  adapted  to  the 
vast  and  heterogeneous  needs  of  a  democracy? 
A  group  of  Fellows,  picked  men  as  they  are  nowa- 
days, living  in  monastic  seclusion  in  a  gray-waUed 
Cambridge  garden,  with  a  chosen  race  of  boys  ex- 
posed, like  volunteers  in  a  medical  experiment,  to 
culture  and  intellectual  honesty  and  the  desire  to 
know  until  the  infection  takes  —  such  a  system,  in 
spite  of  rigidities  and  archaisms,  is  sure  to  produce 
some  remarkable  results.  But  there  will  be  no 
monastic  seclusion  for  our  millions  in  America ;  no 
period  of  undisturbed  incubation,  no  high  propor- 
tion of  trained  to  untrained  minds.  Is  the  thing 
possible  or  desirable  in  a  democracy? 

I  should  not  have  written  an  article  in  war-time 
on  a  subject  like  this  if  I  did  not  believe  that  there 
was  the  best  kind  of  evidence  of  the  highest  im- 
portance for  Great  Britain,  and  potentially  im- 
portant for  us,  that  you  can  practically  educate 
by  the  meeting  of  minds  in  a  democracy.  Nothing 
better  proves  the  vitality  of  the  English  idea  of 
how  to  educate  than  its  reaching  out  to  meet  the 
new  conditions  of  life  that,  beginning  a  decade  or 
more  ago,  are  now  rushing  throughout  the  British 
world.     I  mean  the  W.  E.  A.,  the  Workmen's  Edu- 


166  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

cational  Association,  the  training-school  whence 
many  of  the  most  alert  political  and  economic 
thinkers  in  England  have  sprung  or  been  inspired. 

Every  one  should  know  about  the  W.  E.  A.,  even 
in  America,  for  it  has  not  lacked  advertisement. 
Books  have  been  written  upon  it  as  a  successful 
educational  experiment ;  its  doctrines  and  practice 
have  been  preached  here  as  well  as  all  over  the 
British  Empire;  and  those  familiar  with  the  cur- 
rents of  British  thought  know  that,  in  its  effects, 
it  is  a  political  force  of  the  first  magnitude.  Nev- 
ertheless, it  wiU  bear  brief  explaining.  The  W.  E. 
A.  is  only  fifteen  years  old.  I  know  its  founder,  a 
workman,  and  its  first  tutors,  still  youngish  men. 
It  began  at  Oxford,  not,  like  so  many  "  settle- 
ments," to  "  uplift "  the  lower  classes,  but  defi- 
nitely and  consciously  as  a  means  of  bringing 
together  workmen  who  wanted  to  understand  the 
economic  system  of  which  they  were  a  part,  and 
students  of  economics  and  sociology  who,  while 
teaching  the  theory  of  their  subjects,  could  learn 
the  practice  from  the  men  and  women  they  taught. 
Thus  the  W.  E.  A.  is  distinctly  a  meeting  of  minds, 
designed  to  train  the  less  skilled,  but  with  advan- 
tages for  both. 

A  group  of  men  and  women  (never  larger  than 
thirty-two)  forms  among  workers,  let  us  say,  in 
the  pottery  industries  of  the  "  Five  Towns  "  dis- 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  167 

trict.  They  choose  a  course,  which  will  probably 
begin  with  a  history  of  industrial  conditions,  as  of 
closest  kin  to  their  interests,  but  may  lead  through 
politics,  science,  history,  literature,  wherever  they 
want  to  go,  provided  that  it  consists  of  such  re- 
lated subjects  as  a  university  might  require.  The 
course  is  three  years  as  a  minimum,  with  an  oppor- 
tunity to  spend  a  week  in  Oxford  or  Cambridge  or 
some  other  university  summer  school  afterward, 
and  they  must  elect  the  course  for  three  years. 
There  are  twenty-four  meetings  a  year,  a  week 
apart ;  two  hours  each  of  them,  an  hour  roughly 
for  the  tutor's  disquisitions,  one  hour  for  free  dis- 
cussion. The  tutor  comes  from  the  university,  the 
cost  is  borne  by  the  university,  by  labor  organiza- 
tions, and  by  the  board  of  education.  Books  are 
used  freely,  and  are  supplied  by  the  association. 
There  are  no  examinations,  no  work  for  a  certifi- 
cate or  direct  means  of  betterment,  because  no 
competition  is  desired;  but  twelve  essays  must  be 
written  a  year.  Where  the  subject  is  taken  up, 
how  it  is  developed,  what  questions  are  discussed — 
these  are  not  to  be  found  in  syllabi,  but  depend  up- 
on the  intelligence,  the  previous  training,  the  pres- 
ent interests  of  the  group  and  the  tutor.  It  is  not 
forced-draught  education,  but  rather  the  meeting 
of  minds  between  men  and  women  desiring  to  in- 
crease their  power  of  criticizing  life  and  an  in- 


168  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

structor  who,  like  an  earlier  Englishman,  would 
gladly  learn  and  gladly  teach.  The  emphasis  is 
all  upon  the  personal  relation.  And  this  simple 
system  has  spread  widely  over  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland,  has  captivated  "  materialistic  Australia," 
and,  through  the  adoption  of  its  principles  in  much 
army  teaching,  is  becoming  familiar  to  the  whole 
empire.  The  sanity,  the  vigor,  and,  most  impor- 
tant of  all,  the  political  vision  of  the  best  labor 
leaders  of  Great  Britain,  now  probably  the  broad- 
est and  soundest  defenders  of  labor  interests  in  the 
world,  come,  most  of  all,  I  think,  from  the  example 
of  the  W.  E.  A. 

I  have  tried  to  make  clear  that  this  is  no  ran- 
dom philanthropic  experiment,  but  rather  a 
sprouting  into  new  life  of  a  national  instinct. 
This  is  what  makes  it  worth  writing  about  for 
readers  who  have  only  a  general  interest  in  edu- 
cation. Essentially,  the  W.  E.  A.  puts  mature 
but  untrained  minds  into  touch  with  men  who  care 
immensely  for  the  intellectual  welfare  of  the  com- 
munity. I  saw  the  same  principle  working  in  a 
great  factory  in  the  north  of  England,  whose  man- 
agers had  run  ahead  of  the  continuation  schools 
proposed  by  the  Fisher  bill,  and  put  in  schools  of 
their  own  where  working  boys  and  girls  were  given 
from  three  to  six  hours  a  week  under  men  and 
women  whose  sole  interest  was  in  their  develop- 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  169 

in'g  bodies  and  minds.  The  very  heart  of  the 
Fisher  bill  was  not  to  teach  this  or  that,  but  to 
keep  the  youth  of  Great  Britain  for  four  years 
longer  in  the  care  of  those  who  might  wish  to  de- 
velop, not  to  exploit,  them.  I  heard  a  master  of 
apprentices  in  an  old  skilled  trade  that  had  in- 
herited the  best  medieval  traditions  of  boy  work- 
ers say  one  night :  "  The  only  way  to  save  Eng- 
land after  this  war  is  to  have  more  education  for 
the  boys  and  girls.  I  don't  care  what  they  teach 
them,  though  I  should  prefer  to  have  it  general  as 
well  as  technical;  the  important  thing  is  that  it 
should  be  somebody's  business  to  look  after  their 
minds." 

I  believe  that  this  sound  instinct  for  true  educa- 
tion has  been  the  chief  cause  of  British  initiative 
and  political  and  intellectual  strength  in  the  cen- 
tury past,  and  I  further  believe  that  it  explains  the 
surprising  strength  of  Great  Britain  when,  in  sud- 
den catastrophe,  she  was  thrown  from  peace  into 
deadly  conflict  with  a  nation  far  more  completely 
trained  than  herself.  The  flat  truth  is  that  the 
German  was  better  educated,  in  so  far  as  education 
means  knowledge  and  disciphne,  than  the  English- 
man, especially  in  the  lower  and  middle  grade  of 
society;  and  yet  less  excellently  educated  in  the 
things  that  make  for  wisdom.  The  British  defi- 
ciencies —  lack  of  science,  lack  of  system,  lack  of 


170  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

a  breadth  of  opportunity  —  we  have  already 
avoided.  They  may  be  left  for  home  correction, 
but  we  must  not  disregard,  as  of  local  concern 
only,  the  secret  that  has  made  England  successful 
in  spite  of  her  faults. 

War  makes  men  dishonest  as  regards  the  future, 
for  the  rush  of  passions  toward  desire  for  victory 
drowns  judgment  and  common  sense.  But  the  in- 
tense reality  of  war-time  makes  us  very  honest 
toward  our  past.  What  American,  looking  back 
from  1919,  does  not  find  his  estimate  of  school  or 
college  education  vastly  altered?  Experiences  he 
had  supposed  were  not  education  at  all  —  ad- 
ventures, casual  reading,  personal  relationships  — 
have  clearly  taught  him  much.  Whole  sets  of 
formal  training  appear  as  lost  motion  utterly. 
Habits  formed  in  work  he  hated  under  minds  that 
impressed  him,  ideas  shot  irregularly  from  the 
world  of  knowledge  that  took  root  somehow  — 
these  remain.  Does  he  doubt  that  his  best  educa- 
tion was  self-acquired?  Does  he  doubt  that  a 
steadying  hand,  a  pointing  finger,  an  atmosphere 
where  learning  seemed  worth  while,  were  the  best 
things  that  came  to  him  (if  he  got  them)  from 
teaching  in  school  and  college?  What  sheer 
brain  prostitution  was  most  of  his  "  tutoring  "  for 
examinations!  What  unnecessary  boredom  the 
recording  of  "  facts  "  from  innumerable  lectures 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  171 

heard  and  not  heeded !  What  unspeakable  benefit 
the  few  "  inspirations  "  from  minds  greater  and 
sweeter  than  his,  when  the  spark  shot  and  hit  and 
smoldered  and  is  still  burning! 

Why  can  we  not  now  be  honest  about  education 
in  America?  Why  can  we  not  say  that  it  is  too 
arid,  too  impersonal,  that  it  is  successful  only  be- 
cause life  in  America  has  itself  been  an  education? 
Are  we  too  proud  to  borrow  this  British  secret 
from  a  nation  that  in  many  respects  is  less  edu- 
cated than  our  own?  Are  we  too  proud  to  borrow 
for  our  many  what  has  been  given  to  their  chosen 
ones  with  a  success  that  our  best  curricula  have 
seldom  known?  Our  technical,  scientific  education 
in  advanced  work  has  been  highly  individual,  and 
the  results  are  where  all  can  see  them.  Why  is  it 
that  in  the  things  of  the  mind  —  in  his  criticism  of 
life,  in  his  sense  of  values,  in  his  knowledge  of  how 
to  use  his  vital  energy  —  the  American  is  still  so 
crude,  so  youthful  in  comparison  with  Englishmen 
less  vigorous  and  less  potential  ?  It  is  because  his 
**  liberal  "  education  has  blown  over  him  in  airy 
precepts,  has  been  fed  to  him  in  capsules  swallowed 
but  never  digested,  has  come  to  him  wrapped  in 
words  instead  of  active  personality. 

And  the  difficulties  in  the  way,  the  expense,  the 
magnitude  of  the  problem !  The  energy  absorbed 
by  a  week  of  war  would  carry  an  intellectual  revo- 


172  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

lution.  A  few  slight  changes  in  the  practice  of 
our  American  colleges  as  they  were  run  before  the 
war  would  make  important  changes  with  little  dif- 
ficulty. The  ratio  of  teachers  to  students  was  in 
good  institutions  of  collegiate  grade  roughly  as 
one  to  ten.  If  each  teacher  were  given  a  personal 
responsibility  for  the  minds  of,  say,  ten  men,  ex- 
ercised perhaps  only  in  the  briefest  of  weekly  meet- 
ings, the  increase  in  toil,  where  there  was  any, 
would  be  balanced  by  the  inspiration  of  friendly 
contact,  increase  in  expense  there  would  be  little 
or  none.  Now  we  choose  "  division  officers  "  and 
ask  them  to  be  personally  responsible  for  the  in- 
tellectual conscience  of  sixty-odd  students ;  the 
rest  of  the  faculty  need  only  teach.  Such  a 
change  would  be  only  a  beginning,  just  a  little 
fresh  blood  pumping  through  old  arteries  —  but 
we  would  soon  go  farther. 

Already  we  have  entered  upon  one  of  the  great- 
est of  all  educational  experiments  —  an  army  of 
youths  trained  for  war,  who  must  be  prepared  for 
peace  while  in  demobilization.  Although  the  cir- 
cumstances are  so  widely  different,  the  problem  is 
almost  identical  with  that  of  the  W.  E.  A.  Fairly 
mature  minds,  of  every  degree  of  previous  train- 
ing, are  in  both  instances  to  be  given  quickly  and 
in  the  midst  of  distractions  what  they  vitally  need 
to  make  life  more  livable.     Shall  we  hand  them  in 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  173 

lectures  the  general  knowledge  they  require  in  ad- 
dition to  their  ration  of  technical  instruction;  or 
by  personal  contact  with  those  who  know  shall 
they  be  made  to  crave  and  get  knowledge?  The 
two  methods  are  different ;  and  the  second,  though 
hard,  is  practicable,  and  in  the  long  run  the 
cheaper. 

Very  soon  now,  and  in  a  wrecked  world,  we  shall 
fully  realize  how  precious  is  youth,  how  essential 
that  not  one  drop  of  its  energies  shall  be  wasted. 
We  will  direct  our  courses  of  study  toward  the 
needs  of  the  future,  and  direct  them  easily  and  well, 
for  there  we  have  practice.  But  shall  we  place  the 
emphasis  upon  courses  and  systematized  depart- 
ments of  learning  or  upon  the  shaping  of  minds  to 
crave  facts  and  get  them?  The  two  methods  go 
together;  but  they  are  different,  and  without  the 
second  the  first  alone  will  never  meet  the  emer- 
gency. Since  the  days  of  Plato  men  have  been 
saying  in  every  language  and  environment :  "  It 
was,  after  all,  one  or  two  men  who  educated  me. 
They  set  me  thinking."  How  far  in  America  will 
we  act  upon  that  principle?  How  far  have  we 
acted  upon  it?  Consider  the  text-book,  his  mul- 
titude and  his  aridity,  if  you  wish  an  answer. 

We  Americans,  however,  also  have  our  national 
instinct  in  education.  It  is  a  commonplace  to  say 
that  from  the  founding  of  the  nation  we  have  tried 


174  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

to  give  equal  opportunities  to  all  to  be  educated. 
Indeed  we  know  what  was  proposed  better,  per- 
haps, than  what  has  been  accomplished.  English 
observers,  now  that  England  is  on  the  way  to  sud- 
den social  democracy,  see  it  most  clearly,  and  are 
eager  to  learn  of  us.  Our  intense  systematiza- 
tion,  our  standardization  of  teachers  and  teaching 
and  subjects  and  text-books  —  that  very  machin- 
ery whose  noisy  grinding  has  so  often  drowned  the 
voice  of  personal  instruction  —  all  this  is  just  a 
means  of  realizing  our  national  instinct  for  demo- 
cratic education.  No  other  nation  in  the  world, 
not  even  highly  trained  Germany,  has  tried  to  open 
all  kinds  of  education  to  everybody ;  and  if  we  have 
made  tremendous  errors  we  have  also  invaluable 
experience.  England  has  as  much  to  learn  from 
our  high-school  system  as  we  have  from  her  theory 
of  how  to  teach. 

The  cry  there  is,  Be  practical  and  consider  the 
taxpayer.  And  the  reply  in  England  is  that  the 
taxpayer  deserves,  first  of  all,  education  for  his 
money,  and  that  he  must  therefore  get  access  to 
vital  education.  The  cry  in  America  is  the  same, 
and  the  answer  should  not  be  different.  But  unless 
we  learn  from  one  another,  both  sets  of  taxpayers, 
as  in  the  past,  will  be  cheated.  A  hundred  pounds 
for  a  child's  education  is  cheap  if  you  get  results ; 
is  dear  if  the  factory  takes  the  child  prematurely 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  175 

and  exploits  him.  A  thousand  dollars  (the  price 
of  a  great  shell)  is  little  to  spend  upon  a  child's 
education,  if  he  gets  educated. 

Four  years  ago  an  essay  like  this  one  should 
have  been  a  treatise  on  education,  or  remained  un- 
written. It  should  have  surveyed  at  length  our 
schools  and  colleges  and  those  of  the  English,  ex- 
plaining the  methods,  criticizing  them,  pointing 
out  how,  by  marked  changes  in  our  purpose  and 
slight  ones  in  our  practice  in  teaching,  we  could 
vastly  increase  our  results,  pointing  out  that  by 
more  system  and  a  restricted  standardization  the 
British  could  extend  their  benefits  to  a  whole  pop- 
ulation. The  Workmen's  Educational  Associa- 
tion, which  has  accomplished  both  these  ends, 
would  have  provided  merely  an  adequate  introduc- 
tion. 

It  is  different  now.  Still  in  the  shadow  of  war 
we  can  make  no  elaborate  plans,  but  with  every- 
thing on  the  move  about  us  we  are  in  the  very  mood 
for  seizing  new  principles.  Many  have  felt  for 
years  that  a  period  of  productive  work  in  the 
world  should  precede  the  ending  of  every  educa- 
tion, yet  could  never  contrive  general  acceptance. 
Now  the  war  has  forced  our  boys,  many  of  them 
half  educated,  into  the  most  intense  of  practical 
experiences,  and  we  begin  to  see  how  youthful 
service  to  the  state,  continued  after  the  war,  may 


176  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

be  a  real  aid  to  education.  One  hopes  that  the 
service  may  not  be  exclusively  military,  that  Wil- 
liam James's  fine  dream,  "  A  Moral  Substitute  for 
War,"  will  find  unexpected  realization. 

Two  years  ago  in  America  we  were  criticizing 
the  dogmatic  character  of  most  of  our  educating, 
and  wondering  helplessly  how  we  could  teach  the 
teachers  of  boys  and  girls  that  learning  came  by 
working  out  problems,  not  by  hearing  the  answers. 
Then  with  a  sweep  our  youths  were  flung  into  the 
highly  experimental  business  of  war,  where  aU  ad- 
vance, from  the  shooting  of  a  gun  to  food  control, 
is  learned  only  by  practice.  Will  the  boy  of 
eighteen  who  has  been  through  a  training-camp 
and  the  new  life  of  the  trenches,  where  he  has 
learned  by  doing  them  new  ranges  of  activities  — 
will  he  ever  again  take  second-hand  statements  of 
theory  in  history  or  economics  or  literature,  and 
think  he  is  being  educated?  The  answer  may  be, 
yes  —  if  we  let  him.  But  will  we  let  him?  For 
we  also  have  learned  by  experience,  have  been 
grasping  new  principles. 

The  truth  is  that  everybody  is  being  re-educated 
now,  except  those  petrified  beings  who  are  beyond 
alteration ;  and,  where  every  one  is  learning,  there 
is  no  opportunity  for  one  age  to  impose  upon  an- 
other its  sets  of  crystallized  ideas  that  must  be 
accepted  whole  or  evaded.      Education  is  vital 


EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  177 

again  because  it  has  become  a  universal  experience. 

I  spent  a  day  last  spring  in  the  Bull  Dog  Club 
on  Edgeware  Road  in  London,  an  institution  that 
began  as  a  home  for  soldiers  on  leave  with  nowhere 
to  go,  and  then  extended  its  care  to  discharged 
men  whose  old  careers  were  lost  to  them  and  who 
needed  guidance  and  help.  Everywhere  in  Eng- 
land one  heard  the  questions:  What  are  the  half- 
educated  eighteen-year-olders  to  do  when  they 
come  back,  tired  boys  without  a  trade  or  profes- 
sion? What  are  the  sometime  clerks  to  become 
after  two  or  three  years  in  the  honorable  but  im- 
permanent profession  of  being  an  officer?  Will 
they  go  back?  What  are  the  gentleman  rankers 
to  do,  impaired  in  health,  without  either  profession 
or  money,  and  thrown  upon  the  unsettled  labor- 
market  of  England  after  the  war?  I  was  inter- 
ested, naturally,  in  an  opportunity  to  get  advance 
information  from  a  club  where  every  day  such 
cases  were  already  being  handled.  The  man  with 
a  trade  is  easily  placed,  they  told  me.  The  men 
without  a  trade  and  lacking  in  especial  intellectual 
ability  are  a  grave  problem.  Of  the  men  with 
brains  and  intellectual  training,  many  of  them  say 
that  they  want  to  go  in  for  teaching. 

It  surprised  me  then,  but  not  after  I  had  been  to 
the  front  and  lived  longer  in  France  and  England. 
It  was  minds  these  men  wanted  to  teach,  because 


178  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

their  own  had  been  altered.  War,  as  Thucydides 
said,  educates  by  violence;  and  by  violence  these 
soldiers  had  been  educated  to  understand  what  a 
man  must  know  about  life.  If  I  were  searching  for 
teachers  I  should  choose  them  in  preference  to 
others  with  more  knowledge  but  a  less  illuminating 
experience. 


VIII 
ON    THE    NEXT   WAR 

The  next  war  will  not  be  over  Ireland,  as  certain 
Sinn  Feiners  believe ;  nor  yet  against  Germany,  as 
a  year  ago  there  was  too  much  reason  to  expect. 
It  will  be  between  idealists  and  realists  worked  out 
in  terms  of  the  world  instead  of  Germany  or  Ire- 
land; and  there  is  reason  to  hope  that  if  there  is 
bleeding  it  will  be  from  pocket-books,  and  if  bomb- 
ing, it  will  be  of  prejudices,  and  if  pain,  it  will  be 
the  mental  agony  of  those  who  will  be  forced  to 
choose  a  side  and  sacrifice  much  in  the  choosing. 

All  over  the  world  the  liberals  and  the  conserva- 
tives are  drawing  apart  and  preparing  for  battle. 
It  is  not  a  question  of  parties,  or  rather,  it  wiU 
soon  cease  to  be ;  it  is  a  difference  in  temperament 
or  privilege  that  separates  them.  A  millionaire 
may  be  radical  if  his  temperament  is  right  for  it; 
a  poor  man  may  be  crustily  conservative.  And 
some  liberals  become  conservative  with  a  turn  in 
the  market  or  a  new  job. 

The  dangers  of  the  liberal  we  know  well.  His 
idealism,  especially  when  it  is  naive,  makes  him 
sometimes  futile,  and  often  the  prey  of  the  destruc- 
tive radical.  But  he  is  the  engine  of  modern  civ- 
ilization. If  he  stalls  or  is  wrecked,  it  is  difficult 
179 


180  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

to  conceive  of  a  future  that  will  be  interesting  to  a 
man  of  democratic  and  humanitarian  tastes. 

The  conservative,  of  course,  is  the  brake,  and 
the  figure  is  not  uncomplimentary,  since  an  invalu- 
able function  is  exercised  by  a  mechanism  designed 
to  retard.  The  danger  of  the  honest  conservative 
has  been  little  exploited  in  the  press,  especially  in 
war-time  America.  We  have  filled  pages  describ- 
ing the  means  by  which  the  gentle  pacifist  became 
a  cat's-paw  for  the  ravening  militarist.  Every 
one  knows,  or  thinks  they  know,  that  the  socialist 
and  pacifist  were  mere  tools  of  German  propa- 
ganda. Few  see  that  now  the  war  is  over  an  iden- 
tical game  is  being  played  elsewhere.  The  con- 
servative temperament  is  the  natural  prey  of  the 
possessive  instinct.  Whosoever  intends  to  hold 
more  than  he  has  earned  of  wealth  or  position  seeks 
the  laudator  tempores  acti,  the  sincere  upholder  of 
tradition,  the  opponent  of  flashy  progress  and 
doubtful  change,  to  do  his  arguing  for  him,  and 
supply  moralities  for  his  campaign.  Because  the 
idealism  of  the  American  international  program  of 
1919  seems  to  depart  too  far  from  an  old  order 
which  he  had  found  good,  because  he  distrusts  the 
enthusiasm  with  which  European  radicals  greet 
it,  many  an  honest  conservative  unwittingly  has 
allied  himself  with  the  mammon  of  possessiveness, 
with  men  who  profited  by  the  unscrupulous  com- 
petitions that  led  directly  toward  1914,  and  re- 
gardless of  the  world's  agony  wish  to  continue 
them. 

I  have  seen  the  superintendent  of  a  great  Eng- 
lish munition  works  strike  the  table  with  his  fist, 


ON  THE  NEXT  WAR  181 

declaring,  "  By  God,  we  must  have  boys  to  tend 
our  furnaces,  and  we'll  wreck  any  government  that 
tries  to  take  them  away  to  educate  them !  "  And 
I  have  heard  an  American  of  pure  heart  and  lofty 
ideals  argue  for  irritating  tariffs,  inequitable  tax- 
ation, and  individualism  (whether  of  nations  or  of 
capitalists)  unrestrained,  simply  because  "  any- 
thing was  better  than  Bolshevism,"  to  which  the 
opposite  policies,  so  he  professed  to  think,  might 
lead.  The  pity  of  it !  There  are,  says  the  edito- 
rial writer,  three  real  parties  in  the  world  as  it  is, 
the  conservative,  the  liberal,  and  the  radical.  I 
deny  it.  There  are  only  two :  the  honestly  liberal 
and  the  honestly  conservative.  But  their  numbers 
are  small  in  comparison  with  the  predacious 
(whether  Bolsheviks  or  reactionary)  whose  opin- 
ions are  their  pocket-books,  and  the  horde  of  the 
innocent,  the  muddled,  and  the  prejudiced  upon 
whom  they  prey. 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  MARCHING  HOME 

Three  questions  men  everywhere  in  the  Western 
world  have  asked  constantly  in  their  hearts :  Can 
Germany  be  beaten?  When  will  peace  come? 
What  will  happen  after  the  war?  The  first  is 
settled;  the  second  has  found  its  reply;  the  third 
is  hard  upon  us.  The  answer  will  be  a  drama  al- 
ready prepared  and  set,  with  the  curtain  just  ris- 
ing, a  drama  of  uncertainties.  And  the  great  un- 
certainties are:  What  will  the  soldiers  want? 
Into  what  has  the  war  made  them?  What  will 
they  do,  British,  French,  American,  when  they 
come  home? 

No  one  knows,  but  many  are  speculating,  espe- 
cially of  course  in  Europe,  where  four  years  of  war 
have  changed  men,  body  and  brains  and  soul,  from 
their  earlier  selves.  Six  months  ago,  in  London, 
an  editor  told  me  of  a  straw  vote  he  had  taken  in  a 
hospital  ward  to  determine  how  many  men  there 
had  changed  their  political  allegiance.  The  per- 
centage of  change  was  high,  and  the  Labor  Party 
was  indicated  as  a  new  favorite ;  but  this  is  not  the 
significant  point  in  the  story.  Within  the  next 
few  weeks  that  anecdote  was  quoted  in  several  Lon- 
182 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         183 

don  newspapers ;  a  little  later  it  made  the  emphatic 
first  paragraph  of  a  political  article  in  the  most 
influential  American  monthly;  and  I  have  seen  it 
cropping  up  again  and  again  since.  It  is  clear 
that  we  are  vastly  ignorant  of  the  real  ideas  of  the 
soldier,  if  a  straw  vote  among  twenty  men  is  taken 
as  evidence  of  the  minds  of  the  millions  at  the 
front. 

Has  the  soldier  definite  ideas  upon  social  reform, 
or  international  relations,  or  politics.?  Has  he 
become  radical,  or  reactionary,  or  pacifist,  or  mil- 
itarist.'' My  own  observation  leads  me  to  doubt  it 
strongly.  The  Americans  have  been  too  busy  with 
a  new  environment  to  think  much.  The  British 
and  the  French  have  been  too  tired.  I  am  writing, 
of  course,  of  the  common  man,  private  or  officer. 
More  sensitive  minds  have  been  set  strongly  vi- 
brating. Intellectuals  have  found  trench  life  not 
unfavorable  to  speculation.  But  the  army  as  a 
whole  seems  to  live  a  simple,  unreflecting  life, 
spaced,  as  a  British  officer  said,  between  disagree- 
able boredom  and  still  more  disagreeable  danger. 
The  soldier  in  general  is  fixed  upon  his  single  pur- 
pose and  not  inclined  to  go  beyond  the  next  pos- 
sible shell  burst  in  considering  the  reconstruction 
of  the  world.  My  chief  recollections  of  conversa- 
tions during  two  weeks  spent  with  a  miscellaneous 
group  of  officers,  are  of  the  novelty  of  the  sur- 


184  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

roundings,  the  interest  of  the  new  facts  we  had  to 
discuss,  and  the  platitudinous  staleness  of  the 
general  ideas  proffered  upon  the  war  and  the 
future.  *'  Things  are  going  to  be  different  after 
the  war,"  was  about  as  far  as  we  got.  Indeed, 
active  service,  no  matter  how  novel,  is  not  usually 
a  breeder  of  ideas.  What  it  does  is  to  form  new 
habits  of  mind. 

We  need,  of  course,  no  psychologist  to  tell  us 
that  it  is  not  new  thoughts  so  much  as  the  things 
behind  thinking  that  bring  about  great  changes. 
In  habits  of  mind  fixed  by  experience,  not  in  ran- 
dom conversations,  or  ideas  shot  off  in  the  stress 
of  argument,  lies  the  birth  of  the  new  world,  if  one 
is  to  come  after  the  war.  The  enthusiast  is  given 
free  play  in  a  time  of  general  upset.  Since  with 
civilization  at  war  anything  seems  possible,  he  sees 
a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth,  with  no  one  to  gain- 
say him.  But  we  know  well  that  when  this  old 
lumbering  wagon  of  a  world  jolts  back  into  the 
ruts  again  we  will  jog  on  indifferent  to  the  voice 
of  the  exhorter,  even  though  the  tears  in  his  eyes 
as  he  spoke  of  education  universal  and  poverty 
abolished  made  our  own  moist  with  hope.  Ora- 
tory and  optimism,  ideas  no  matter  how  burning, 
have  little  chance  with  use  and  want.  But  with 
habits  the  struggle  is  more  equal.  If  we  ask,  How 
will  the  soldiers  act.?      What  will  they  want.''  it  is 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         185 

to  their  new  emotions  aroused  and  made  perma- 
nent, their  new  ways  of  thinking  become  habitual, 
that  we  must  look  for  answer.  No  man  in  the 
armies  of  the  world  has  been  living  as  he  lived 
before  the  war.  Only  the  most  inflexible  have  been 
feeling  and  thinking  in  just  the  same  fashion. 
There  is  the  vital  difference,  and  it  will  determine 
the  future. 

What  habits  will  Johnny  bring  home  with  him.'' 
He  will  bring  military  discipline,  of  course,  a 
readiness  in  obeying  orders,  precision  in  executing 
them,  respect  for  superiors,  and  a  livelier  attention 
to  the  needs  of  those  about  him.  This  may  cure 
some  of  the  slackness  of  the  unmilitary  nations ; 
but  I  think  it  means  little  in  itself  that  is  funda- 
mental. America  and  Great  Britain  in  peace 
times  (now  that  we  look  backward)  were  not  worse 
off,  for  all  their  lack  of  discipline,  than  Germany 
and  France.  Discipline,  like  a  good  accent,  is  an 
admirable  thing  unless  you  pay  too  much  for  it. 
Germany  paid  too  much.  I  cannot  believe  that  it 
is  military  discipline  which  is  going  to  transform 
either  Great  Britain  or  America. 

Nor  do  I  believe  in  a  veiled  and  powerful  mili- 
tarism behind  this  discipline  which  will  change  us, 
as  some  fear,  body  and  soul.  The  Britisher,  as 
many  will  teU  you,  is  less  militaristic  than  before 
the  war.     The  American,  who  was  not  militaristic 


186  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

at  all,  will  find  himself  unchanged,  unless,  indeed, 
the  war  ended  so  quickly  that  thousands  of  us  re- 
main overstocked  with  fighting  spirit.  The  pas- 
sion for  modern  war  as  such  which  one  finds  bot- 
tled in  many  Americans  on  this  side  of  the  water, 
would  be  humorous  if  it  were  not  potential  of  diffi- 
culties in  the  future.  There  should  be  some  savage 
African  district,  well  supplied  with  wire-entangle- 
ments, tanks,  bombs,  shrapnel,  gas,  mud,  and  lice, 
and  garrisoned  by  a  cannibal  tribe  trained  by 
Prussian  officers  and  needing  extinction,  the  whole 
to  be  used  as  a  cooling  ground  for  soldiers  who 
came  into  war  too  late  to  discover  what  a  horrible 
business  it  is  when  separated  from  lofty  principles. 

Habits  of  mind  more  deep-reaching  than  the 
discipline  of  drill,  and  more  universal  than  left- 
over blood-thirstiness,  Johnny  will  bring  back 
with  him.  He  has  been  made  simple,  and  he  will 
demand  simplicity  in  the  life  to  which  he  is  re- 
turning. 

War  introduces  an  enormous  complexity  in  the 
business  of  running  the  state,  but  great  simplicity 
in  the  life  of  the  individual  soldier.  There  was  a 
window  in  the  Army  and  Navy  stores  in  London 
given  over  entirely  to  devices  for  simplifying  life ; 
a  combination  bed-roll  and  kit-bag  that  would 
carry  everything  the  soldier  needs ;  trench  outfits 
in  which  the  paraphernalia  of  a  flat,  minus  the 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME    187 

furniture,  was  reduced  to  essentials  and  tucked 
into  a  parcel ;  devices  whereby  all  that  was  needed 
in  the  science  of  war  hung  by  hooks  or  wrapped  by 
bands  around  you.  And  the  married  man,  with  a 
house  and  a  garden  and  a  motor  and  a  wife  and 
two  children  and  a  thousand  different  articles  be- 
longing to  and  occasionally  used  by  him,  entered 
the  door  mentally  loaded  with  them  all,  and  left 
physically  staggering  under  his  kit,  but  bearing 
about  him  all  that  he  needed  for  France  or  Syria, 
for  a  month  or  the  duration  of  the  war. 

And  this  simplification  of  the  means  of  life  has 
its  complement  upon  the  battlefield  in  the  simpli- 
fication of  the  ends  of  life.  The  hopes,  the  pur- 
poses, the  desires  of  the  soldier,  whose  weights  op- 
press in  peace  time,  are  reduced  to  their  lower 
limits.  He  hopes  to  win,  or  to  get  a  "  good  little 
wound,"  or  merely  to  stay  alive.  His  purpose  is 
to  obey  orders,  to  do  his  bit  toward  winning  the 
war,  to  get  the  approval  of  his  superiors  and  com- 
panions. He  desires  food,  sleep,  the  long-deferred 
home-coming;  he  desires  promotion.  It  is  all  as 
simple  as  going  camping,  when  your  sole  desire  is 
to  catch  fish,  keep  warm,  and  have  a  good  time; 
and  it  has  the  same  effect  of  general  brain  clear- 
ing. Some  men,  notably  I  believe  the  mechanics 
of  our  industrial  system,  whose  life  had  already 
been  rendered  simple  by  machinery,  passed  into 


188  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

this  new  order  with  little  change  except  an  inter- 
est they  had  never  felt  before,  accompanied  by  new 
hardship  and  pain.  But  for  most  men  such  an 
unshipping  of  life's  goods,  material  and  spiritual, 
means  a  transformation.  For  good  or  iU.'^  Some- 
times the  one,  sometimes  the  other;  too  long  con- 
tinued almost  universally  for  ill.  That,  however, 
is  not  the  question.  Of  more  immediate  impor- 
tance is  the  effect  of  this  new  simplicity  of  exist- 
ence upon  the  returning  soldier,  upon  the  world  to 
which  he  is  returning. 

Others  have  doubtless  observed  that  the  British 
soldier  at  the  front  or  on  leave  complained,  when 
he  talked  at  aU  of  home  affairs,  of  the  "  fussiness  " 
and  the  "  indirection "  of  the  government  for 
which  he  was  fighting.  He  wanted  to  be  rid  of 
"  politicians,"  and  of  people  who  "  beat  about  " 
and  talk  without  getting  anything  done.  He  was 
impatient  with  statesmen  who  "  wobble  "  and  in- 
terfere with  immediate  action.  In  fact,  what  he 
meant  by  **  politician  "  seemed  to  be  a  man  who 
debates  and  discusses  instead  of  doing  something 
with  the  directness  and  simplicity  of  an  order  from 
G.  H.  Q.  It  is  worthy  of  curious  note  that  the 
men  most  inclined  to  criticism  of  this  nature  are 
often  the  speculative,  philosophic  fellows  who  be- 
fore the  war  must  have  spent  many  an  hour  in 
analyzing  action  and  its  motives.     In  the  Ameri- 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME  189 

can  Army,  the  critics  of  "  Washington  "  displayed 
the  same  fine  impatience  with  debate  that  might 
delay  the  order  which  set  men  and  things  in  imme- 
diate motion.  These  men  had  become  habituated  to 
a  life  of  simple  direct  action,  and  were  impatient 
of  any  attitude  toward  the  exigencies  of  the  world 
more  complex  than  their  own. 

It  is  not  improbable  that  civilian  life  is  too  com- 
plex for  efficiency',  and  the  ratio  of  talk  to  accom- 
plishment may  have  been  in  these  years  of  war  too 
large.  All  one  can  say  is  that  in  Great  Britain's 
end  of  the  war  (our  own  is  too  brief  for  judging, 
and  as  to  France  I  do  not  feel  competent)  it  is 
reasonably  clear  that  the  great  errors  have  been 
about  equally  shared  between  the  military  and  the 
civilians  at  home.  This  need  not  be  debated  here. 
What  is  more  important  for  the  future  is,  that 
Joe  Brown  the  machinist  and  William  Cosgrave 
the  lawyer  will  bring  home  with  them  the  habits  of 
the  soldier,  with  effects  that  will  last  longer  than 
the  physical  disturbances  of  war. 

It  may  be  argued  from  this  that  we  shall  have 
an  overturning  of  things-as-they-are  when  the  sol- 
diers come  marching  home.  Strong  words  may  be 
expected  of  them.  What  a  mess,  they  may  say, 
our  government  of  wire-pulling  and  chit-chat  has 
become!  Let  us  issue  general  order  number  217, 
and  change  it.     What  a  silly  confusion  is  our  edu- 


190  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

cational  system,  where  pupils  dawdle  over  work 
that  should  interest  them  and  doesn't ;  or  are  held 
down  to  study  that  can  never  do  them  any  good! 
General  order  325  will  be  a  cure  for  that.  Issue 
it.  What  nonsense  that  fat  porker  Jones  should 
waste  income  he  doesn't  earn,  while  Tom  Reilley 
slaves  on  less  than  a  living  wage !  Let  the  G.  H.  Q. 
at  Washington  act  and  act  quickly ! 

Doubtless  we  shall  get  quicker,  simpler  action 
when  the  boys  come  home,  but  it  is  unwise  to  be 
optimistic,  if  you  are  a  liberal,  and  unnecessary  to 
be  pessimistic,  if  you  are  a  conservative.  It  is, 
after  all,  the  simplicity  of  war  that  is  artificial, 
not  the  complexity  of  peace.  Efficient  govern- 
ment, effective  education,  social  justice,  are  all 
very  difficult  things  to  achieve.  They  cannot  be 
brought  about  by  general  orders.  The  difficulty 
is  not,  as  our  more  rigid  advocates  of  "  prepared- 
ness "  supposed  in  1915,  that  the  civilian  world  is 
too  undisciplined  and  will  not  obey;  but  rather 
that  you  cannot  advance  civilization  by  ordering 
it  forward.  If  hill  number  217  is  taken  as  a  re- 
sult of  a  general's  commands,  it  is  taken,  that  is 
all  there  is  to  it;  and  hill  number  221  becomes  a 
possible  objective.  But  a  general  order  to  redis- 
tribute wealth  might  have  results  no  man  can  fore- 
see. War  stands  in  the  same  relation  to  normal 
life  as  the  simple  desires  of  a  child  to  the  complex 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         191 

and  often  self-defeating  motives  that  actuate  a 
man.  When  Johnny  comes  marching  back  he  will 
find,  like  General  Grant,  that  his  peace  world 
doubles  and  twists  away  from  his  simplifications. 
A  just  government  and  a  happy  family  life  are 
more  difficult  to  capture  than  the  enemy's  trench. 

Let  us  give  over  therefore  expecting  Utopias, 
socialist  or  otherwise,  and  look  not  at  dim  proph- 
ecy but  at  definite  accomplishment.  What  the 
war  has  done  to  the  world  is  not  yet  evident ;  what 
it  has  done  to  men  begins  to  be  clear,  though  not, 
of  course,  the  extent  or  the  durabihty  of  the 
changes.  I  shall  be  content  in  the  paragraphs 
that  follow  to  note  a  few  simple  observations  on  the 
front  and  behind  the  lines  which  seem  to  me  sig- 
nificant, and  better  worth  recording  than  prognos- 
tications because,  if  they  are  true,  they  point  to 
new  habits,  new  emotions  that  will  function  in  the 
future,  and  be  among  the  shaping  forces  of  the 
world  that  lies  ahead. 

The  remarkable  thing  to  me  about  the  psychol- 
ogy of  the  soldier,  especially  the  young  soldier,  is 
the  definiteness  with  which  he  faces  the  future. 
And  this  is  due,  I  am  sure,  to  simplicity  in  that 
military  life  of  which  I  have  been  writing.  War 
has  crystallized  his  mind.  The  vagueness  of 
twentieth  century  youth,  the  blind  and  wasteful 
groping  which  we  teachers  knew  so  well,  has  given 


192  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE  ' 

place  largely  to  a  habit  of  crisp  decision  that  will 
remain. 

Two  illustrations  will  serve  to  make  clear  my 
meaning.  I  was  en  route  on  a  French  railroad 
near  Grammercy  when  a  lieutenant  of  aviation  got 
into  my  compartment.  I  had  known  him  well 
only  twelve  months  before,  an  eager,  "  literary  " 
boy,  alive  with  aspirations  that  kept  jostling  each 
other,  so  that  one  week  he  was  writer,  the  next 
a  social  thinker,  and  the  third  mere  waster  of 
time.  What  his  "  people  "  wanted  him  to  do  was 
in  sharpest  conflict  with  his  own  desires ;  but  just 
what  these  desires  were  neither  he  nor  I  could  say. 
And  I  found  in  the  train  that  day  a  simple,  cheer- 
ful boy,  fascinated  by  his  work,  rather  expecting 
to  be  killed  but  not  bothering  about  it,  quite  ready 
to  do  the  thing  that  most  appealed  to  him  without 
considering  the  cost  or  what  might  come  after- 
ward. What  he  will  want  after  the  war  I  do  not 
know;  but  he  will  know,  and  know  quickly.  His 
mind  had  cleared. 

The  other  was  a  man  of  my  own  age  who  had 
already  a  reputation  for  scholarship  in  a  difficult 
subject.  Esthetics  was  his  field,  but  he  had 
thrown  it  over  for  artillery  organization.  "  This 
generation,"  he  said,  as  we  talked  one  night  on  a 
steamer,  "  is  done  with  analysis  of  the  past.  Def- 
inite, constructive  work,  on  bridges,  or  politics,  or 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         193 

airplanes,  or  social  reform  is  what  men  will  get 
their  minds  on.  I've  put  a  period  in  ray  work. 
I'm  beginning  over  again,"  he  pointed  at  the  nose 
of  a  gun,  "  ^ith  this."  Perhaps  he  is  right ;  per- 
haps, as  I  believe,  he  is  far  too  absolute;  but  at 
least  his  mind  also  had  crystallized  under  the  stress 
of  war. 

Indeed,  I  think  that  Romain  RoUand  saw 
clearly,  as  far  as  his  sight  could  go,  in  that  volume 
of  "  Jean  Christophe  "  in  which  he  described  the 
new  generation  as  a  race  weary  of  introspection, 
criticism,  and  vagueness,  and  seeking  action.  Ac- 
tion they  have  had  to  satiety,  with  good  results  no 
doubt  for  those  who  have  stayed  alive.  I  doubt 
whether  they  will  crave  violent  action  again.  And 
they  are  emerging  from  action  with  minds  that  are 
clearer  and  sharper  than  ours  were,  with  a  de- 
cisiveness that  will  last.  They  will  know  what 
they  want,  and  go  after  it.  Whether  they  will 
get  it  is,  of  course,  another  question. 

I  did  not  at  first  connect  another  quality  of  the 
soldier  mind  with  the  new  decisiveness ;  but  reflec- 
tion shows  that  they  both  spring  from  the  simplic- 
ity of  military  life  and  its  escape  from  the  com- 
plexities of  peace.  I  mean  the  frank  sincerity  of 
the  soldiers,  especially  the  young  soldier.  Every- 
one who  has  moved  through  France  and  England 
comments  upon  this,  and  indeed  the  soldier  poetry 
o 


194  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

which  is  coming  back  so  abundantly  has  frankness 
and  simple  sincerity  for  its  prime  qualities. 
Among  young  Americans  the  result  has  been  to 
lift  the  ban  upon  the  emotions,  especially  where 
danger  has  been  mixed  in  the  cup.  In  a  month  at 
the  University  Union  in  Paris,  I  heard  young  col- 
lege men  talk  more  freely  of  religion,  beauty,  fear, 
affection,  and  the  passions  generally  than  in  years 
of  ordinary  college  experience. 

And  this  has  been  furthered  by  the  breaking 
down  of  racial  barriers ;  for  each  race  has  its  own 
especial  reservations  which  have  become  conven- 
tional, and  the  discovery  that  other  nations  ex- 
press them  freely  has  had  a  salutary  effect.  The 
Englishman  seldom  talks  of  what  he  has  done  and 
how  he  feels  about  it ;  the  Frenchman  is  silent  upon 
family  life;  the  American  speaks  only  shame- 
facedly of  his  intellect  and  his  esthetic  emotions. 
What  a  surprise  it  has  been  for  our  boys  to  hear 
their  French  masters  in  the  science  of  war  talk 
literature,  music,  art,  and  philosophy  in  dug-outs 
and  trenches!  What  an  experience  (and  perhaps 
a  release)  for  the  Englishman  to  join  upon  equal 
duty  with  an  American  in  whom  genial  effusiveness 
clearly  did  not  indicate  inferiority !  All  such  ex- 
periences, and  danger  most  of  all,  join  with  a 
simply  directed  life  to  unlock  the  natural  man  and 
promote  sincerity.  We  may  be  sure  that  the  soldier 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         195 

will  come  back  more  honest  in  saying  and  knowing 
what  he  feels;  more  truthful  therefore  in  living, 
and  more  ready  to  shatter  conventions.  And  the 
effect  of  this  is  bound  to  be  evident  in  politics  and 
social  relations  as  well  as  in  talk  and  in  literature. 
^Vhat  puzzles  me  most  is  the  commonest  of  all 
experiences  in  the  army  and  wherever  the  war 
comes  close  to  the  heart.  I  cannot  tell  whether  its 
intensity  is  due  to  the  brutality  of  war,  which  it 
offsets,  and  will  dim  with  the  recurrence  of  normal 
times,  or  whether,  indeed,  a  new  emotion  has  been 
stirred  in  human  nature,  as  in  the  early  days  of  the 
French  Revolution,  and  will  last  for  decades.  I 
mean  this  time  the  release  of  friendliness  in  the 
war.  I  do  not  mean  the  effusive  sentiment  of  pub- 
lic speakers  and  writers  of  propaganda.  That  is 
well  enough  in  its  way,  because  it  is  probably  more 
genuine  than  ever  before.  What  I  am  remember- 
ing is  not  compliments,  but  the  thing  itself ;  that 
curious  affability  which  has  spread  through  the 
Allied  world  until  an  American  finds  friendly  moods 
(which  mean  more  than  friendly  words)  in  every 
railroad  compartment  in  England  or  France.  Con- 
fidence is  at  the  base  of  it ;  confidence  that  you  and 
the  machine  gunner  and  the  clerk  in  the  Admiralty 
and  the  expert  on  the  Shipping  Board  have  been 
all  wanting  the  same  things  and  have  been 
subject  to  the  same  possible  misfortunes.     It  is  a 


196  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

mood,  indeed,  of  misfortune,  like  the  sudden  friend- 
liness in  a  house  where  death  is  threatening.  For 
the  war  has  been  bad  fortune  in  some  sense,  even 
when  a  release  or  a  stimulus,  to  us  all. 

Have  governments  ever  been  friendly  to  their 
citizens  before.''  But  how  else  can  the  "  nearest 
friend  "  provision  of  the  British  War  Office  be  in- 
terpreted, whereby  the  wife,  the  child,  the  mother, 
or  lacking  these,  the  near  friend  of  a  dying  soldier 
was  sent  at  government  charges  across  the  Chan- 
nel to  ease  his  last  moments  ?  An  acquaintance  of 
mine,  a  worker  in  a  club  for  soldiers  on  leave,  had 
been  kind  to  a  lonely  soldier.  A  message  came  to 
her  one  midnight  that  he  was  dying  in  Flanders, 
that  he  said  she  was  his  only  friend,  that  the  gov- 
ernment wanted  her  to  go  over.  And  she  went,  but 
arrived  too  late. 

Hospitals,  especially  base  hospitals,  were  organ- 
ized in  this  war  on  a  program  of  friendliness.  It 
was  not  merely  the  carefully  planned  color  schemes 
and  decorations  of  the  wards,  which  betrayed 
friendly  consideration  for  the  personalities  as  well 
as  the  bodies  of  the  sick  and  wounded.  Nor  was  it 
only  the  fixed  policy  of  "  cheer  up  "  in  which  every 
attendant  was  drilled.  No,  they  were  clubs,  these 
hospitals.  There  were  men  and  women  in  all  of 
them  whose  business  it  was  to  be  friendly  to  the 
inmates,  to  be  interested  in  their  personal  troubles 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME  197 

and  happinesses,  and  at  least  at  the  great  Third 
London  General  Hospital  at  Wandsworth,  dis- 
charged patients  had  not  merely  the  right,  but  a 
request  to  return  for  a  bed  and  a  meal,  and  the 
privileges  of  a  club  in  which  they  had  become,  so 
to  speak,  non-resident  members.  The  "nearest 
friend  "  of  an  Irish  soldier  was  brought  from  Ire- 
land to  see  him  before  he  was  to  lose  a  leg  by 
amputation.  He  fretted  after  she  had  gone,  and 
so  they  brought  her  back  again  to  marry  him ;  for 
said  he,  "  Shure,  she  mightn't  do  it  after  she  saw 
my  cork  leg."  Institutions  have  souls,  at  least 
in  this  war. 

Very  few  men  will  come  back  from  the  trenches 
and  the  prison  camps,  the  hospitals  and  the  serv- 
ice of  the  S.  O.  S.,  few  men  or  women  from  the  vast 
departments  of  civilian  labor  and  relief,  without 
new  friends  and  new  friendliness  to  make  up  in 
part  for  their  privations  and  the  abnormality  of 
their  war  years.  It  will  be  like  the  experience  of 
life  in  an  American  coUege,  which  also,  in  its  less 
vivid  if  more  agreeable  fashion,  brings  men  and 
women  together  in  a  common  relationship  of  labor 
and  desire, 

Johnny  comes  marching  home  then  with  a  fine 
new  sense  that  life  can  be  mobilized  and  made 
simple  if  he  wishes  it,  a  scrutinizing  sincerity,  and 
a  new  consciousness  of  kinship  with  his  fellow  men. 


198  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

What  happens?  It  will  depend,  I  suppose,  upon 
what  he  finds  when  he  gets  home.  For  the  civilian 
mind  has  been  changing  also. 

I  wonder  if  we  realize  how  much  it  has  changed. 
I  think,  perhaps,  that  one  has  to  be  away  from 
America  for  a  while  among  the  British  where 
change  has  been  ground  into  the  flesh,  then  return 
to  find  his  home  world  still  in  the  mold  and  form 
of  earlier  days,  and  yet  already  in  a  few  months 
enormously  altered.  It  is  not  the  war  and  war 
fever  and  patriotism  that  has  made  the  difference. 
They  were  all  there  before,  latent,  dormant.  To 
become  vehemently  patriotic  was  an  effort,  but  not 
a  change,  for  the  American.  His  alteration  has 
come  through  doing,  not  merely  by  thinking  and 
feeling.  His  change  has  been  in  national  con- 
sciousness not  in  national  character.  Conscious 
service  to  the  state,  in  which  the  majority  have  had 
some  part,  has  brought  it  about.  The  familiar 
words  conceal  the  significance  of  the  new  public- 
mindedness  here  in  America.  We  will  never  go 
back  to  the  fences  built  round  our  own  business, 
our  own  home,  with  their  signs,  *'  no  thorough- 
fare —  except  for  politicians  and  philanthropists 
—  to  the  world  without." 

This  public-mindedness,  like  military  service, 
brings  with  it  a  crystallization  of  ideas.  What 
man  (or  what  woman)  in  civilian  life  does  not  find 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME    199 

his  ideas  more  definite,  his  decisions  quicker,  his 
demands  in  politics,  in  social  life,  in  religion,  in 
morals,  crisper,  clearer,  more  positive  than  before 
the  war?  The  material  of  new  political  parties, 
for  example,  is  already  here,  visible  to  the  ob- 
server, although  it  has  scarcely  as  yet  begun  to 
trouble  the  old  organizations.  Conservatives  are 
becoming  more  definitely  and  more  thoughtfully 
conservative;  liberals  more  constructively  radical. 
In  a  sense  this  means  that  the  bourgeois  are  be- 
ginning to  disappear  by  a  process  less  violent,  to 
be  sure,  than  the  Russian  method  of  extermination, 
but  more  likely  to  benefit  the  state.  The  true 
bourgeois,  I  take  it,  is  the  man  who  having  no 
strongly  felt  class  interests  has  therefore  no  civic 
loyalties  except  to  his  family  and  vaguely  to  the 
land  of  his  birth  or  adoption.  The  laboring  man 
above  the  lowest  grade  escapes  by  his  sense  of  class 
union  against  the  capitalist.  The  aristocracy, 
where  there  is  one,  escapes  through  its  sense  of 
caste;  the  intellectual  by  apprehension  of  world- 
wide relationships ;  the  professional  man  through 
esprit  de  corps.  But  multitudes  of  the  "  middle 
classes,"  both  in  Great  Britain  and  America,  were 
self-contained  and  self-centered  before  the  war. 
Their  lives  were  fat ;  their  brains  were  fat ;  their 
obligations  to  the  community,  except  as  buyers  or 
sellers,  weak  and  langorous.     All  this  is  changing. 


200  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

A  talk  in  any  trolley  car  or  hotel  lobby  or  post 
office  or  club  proves  that.  It  is  difficult  to  live  in 
war  time  and  remain  thoroughly  bourgeois.  But 
it  is  changing  very  slowly. 

Generalizations  upon  communities  must  be  a  lit- 
tle abstract,  for  communities,  unlike  the  army,  are 
not  simplified,  centralized,  made  perforce  uniform. 
Nevertheless,  it  will  be  freely  admitted  that  home 
has  changed ;  and  therefore  we  may  return  to  the 
soldier.  He  will  come  back  with  his  comradeship 
and  his  desire  for  quick,  simple  decisions  into  a 
civilization  that  is  at  least  aroused  to  the  need  of 
change  in  the  present  and  change  in  the  future; 
and  what  will  happen? 

It  is  easier  to  guess  what  may  happen  in  Great 
Britain  where  the  war  has  run  through  the  whole 
social  fabric,  than  in  America  where  the  process 
has  little  more  than  begun.  The  British  world  has 
been  ploughed  deep.  Minds  there  have  been  turned 
up  like  buried  seed  and  are  ready  to  sprout  freshly. 
The  rich  are  prepared  to  be  less  rich ;  the  one-time 
idler  expects  to  continue  working;  the  haters  of 
change  are  prepared  actively  to  resist  it ;  the  for- 
ward looking  have  left  speculation  for  action. 
England  is  electric  with  energy  and  indignation 
and  determination  and  thought. 

On  a  long  and  windy  road  I  met  a  lean  figure 
with  shy,  burning  eyes,  the  forehead  of  a  thinker. 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME    201 

loose  clothes  that  flapped  in  the  wind.  He  dis- 
mounted from  a  dusty  bicycle  and  sat  beside  me  to 
rest.  A  school  teacher,  an  Oxford  man,  a  con- 
servative, he  was  organizing  the  farm  laborers  in 
southwestern  England  so  that  they  might  take 
advantage  of  the  minimum  wage  which  had  been 
allowed  them  in  theory  but  in  practice  withheld. 
He  did  not,  on  the  whole,  believe  in  unions ;  but  the 
minimum  wage  was  an  insurance  against  misery 
and  discontent.  He  made  it  his  business  xmtil 
those  more  fit  should  succeed  him. 

My  road  ended  in  the  park  of  a  great  house 
where  I  had  tea  with  a  "  woman  of  rank,"  as  they 
used  to  say  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  a  labor 
leader,  representatives  of  the  two  classes  least  af- 
fected by  the  spirit  of  the  bourgeois. 

"  What  are  you  going  to  do  with  a  place  like 
mine,"  she  asked,  "  after  the  war.?  It  is  very  ex- 
pensive. We  can  never  pay  your  taxes,  and  yet 
it  is  beautiful.     You  would  miss  my  week  ends !  " 

**  We'll  make  you  a  government  hostess,"  he  re- 
turned quickly.  "  We  can't  get  along  without 
manors  and  the  kind  of  people  that  live  in  them. 
We'U  have  to  find  a  way." 

It  was  a  banter,  of  course,  but  fundamentally 
both  were  serious.  Like  the  dark  browed,  grim 
enthusiast  on  the  bicycle,  they  were  forward  look- 
ing. 


202  EDUCATION.  BY  VIOLENCE 

Again,  in  Oxford,  last  June,  I  was  given  an  op- 
portunity to  study  the  results  of  a  questionnaire 
that  had  been  carefully  prepared  by  experts  and 
sent  to  a  list  of  workmen  all  over  Great  Britain, 
selected  for  their  shrewd  independence  of  thought. 
One  of  the  questions  has  reference  to  the  relations 
of  labor  and  capital  after  the  war.  The  replies 
agreed  with  absolute  unanimity  that  the  "  truce  " 
between  them  would  end  with  the  war,  and  that  the 
struggle  would  be  renewed  and  fought  to  a  finish ; 
but  they  also  agreed,  with  almost  as  complete  a 
consensus,  that  there  were  definite  grounds  of 
agreement,  conciliation,  and  compromise  such  as 
had  never  existed  before.  What  are  these  grounds  ? 
The  writers  did  not  specify.  They  may  have 
meant  the  Whitely  Report  and  the  earlier  labor 
and  land  legislation  of  Lloyd  George.  I  do  not 
think  so.  They  were  conscious  of  something  far 
more  important  —  the  spirit  of  co-operation  that 
the  war  has  made  necessary  in  England;  and  the 
knowledge  of  how  to  co-operate  which  every  fac- 
tory and  organized  industry  has  had  to  acquire. 

These  men  were  also  forward  looking;  and  so 
is  the  army  which  has  learned  co-operation  far 
more  thoroughly  and  added  thereto  the  sanctions 
of  comradeship  in  danger  and  toil.  The  army  way 
doubtless  is  far  too  simple.  It  will  not  work  in 
peace.     The  desire  to  carry  on,  the  direct  and 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         203 

simple  action  of  war  time  will  strike  upon  the  com- 
plexities of  the  civilian  world  of  privilege  and 
shatter ;  but  the  force  of  the  blow  may  drive  Eng- 
land into  a  new  social  order  where  the  value  of 
work  gets  a  juster  assessment.  AVhen  the  soldiers 
come  back  with  their  ideas  of  quickly  mobilizing 
the  muddled  world  they  left  behind  them,  they  will 
perforce  divide  into  a  dozen  parties,  but  each  will 
find  action  under  way  waiting  for  men  to  drive  it 
on.  England  will  not  be  militarized;  for  milita- 
rism is  not  the  kind  of  simplification  that  England 
wants.  She  will  probably  become  more  radical, 
for  vast  numbers  at  home  and  abroad  seek  change. 
She  may  become  more  conservative,  for  the  forces 
of  reaction  and  of  cautious,  thoughtful  delay  have 
strengthened  in  opposition.  But  muddle  —  which 
is  trying  to  be  both  conservative  and  radical  with- 
out plan  or  object  —  will  largely  disappear. 

It  is  different  in  America.  Here  the  war  has 
aroused  our  minds  and  stimulated  decisiveness 
without  forcing  us  to  decide.  We  accepted,  though 
slowly,  the  war;  but  have  not  yet  accepted  the 
necessity  of  changes  to  come  after  it.  We  have 
become,  by  contrast  with  Europe,  the  great  con- 
servative nation.  And  when  Johnny  comes  pour- 
ing back  with  his  belief  in  doing  things  neatly  and 
simply  and  quickly,  and  his  awakened  interest  in 
his  fellow  man,  there  is  far  more  danger  than  in 


204  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

England  of  muddle.  If  his  desire  for  change  finds 
no  safe  outlets  prepared  for  it,  there  may  be  unfor- 
tunate results. 

A  young  American  officer  outlined  to  me  his  idea 
of  America  after  the  war.  We  were  to  apply  the 
principle  of  conscription  to  labor.  The  govern- 
ment was  to  guarantee  all  wages  and  enforce  pro- 
duction. The  fighting  army  was  to  become  a 
working  army.  A  simple,  well-rounded  scheme 
this,  eminently  adapted  to  the  idea  of  business  as 
the  supreme  good ;  but  a  flat  contradiction  of  that 
liberty  of  action  which  even  though  we  may  gladly 
sacrifice  it  in  times  of  crisis,  and  rightly  limit  it 
for  the  benefit  of  the  community,  is  still  sweet.  And 
this  is  precisely  the  kind  of  simplification  that 
a  man  will  bring  back  with  him,  and  find  power  to 
apply,  too,  if  we  at  home  are  not  ready  with  some 
better  means  of  reorganizing  our  world  against 
muddle  and  inefficiency  and  exploitation  by  the 
privileged  of  the  unprotected. 

And  that  great  sweep  of  friendliness  which  has 
embraced  our  troops  as  well  as  our  comrade  armies 
has  its  dangers  also.  Let  the  returning  soldier 
find  a  backsliding  America,  as  anxious  to  get  back 
to  conditions  before  the  war  as  she  was  to  go  upon 
a  war  basis,  and  what  is  fine  emotion  may  become 
self-regarding  and  a  menace.  Friendship  made 
the  Grand  Army  of  the  Republic,  and  the  power  of 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         205 

friendship  made  it  a  political  force  for  such  ex- 
ploitation of  pensions  as  the  world  had  not  hith- 
erto seen.  We  want  opportunities  for  service,  not 
service  pensions,  for  the  veterans  of  the  great  war. 
And  that  means  an  America  where  public  spirited- 
ness  and  the  desire  for  interesting  action  —  qual- 
ities that  belong  to  a  soldier  —  are  given  their 
chance.  You  can  accomplish  this  in  war  time  by 
general  orders  from  a  government  in  danger,  loved, 
and  respected.  But  when  the  corporation,  the 
railroad,  the  department  store,  or  the  university 
again  becomes  the  employer  the  thing  will  not  be 
so  easy.  There  must  be  a  stake  and  a  share  in  the 
control  of  the  enterprise  for  all  of  the  workers. 
Nothing  less  will  guarantee  loyalty  from  men  and 
women  who  have  learned  by  experience  how  a  sense 
of  pride  in  service  and  equal  opportunity  sweetens 
hardship  and  toil. 

Great  Britain,  in  the  stress  of  1917-1918,  when 
relative  starvation  threatened  far  more  nearly 
than  the  ignorant  realized,  when  at  times  there  was 
only  six  weeks'  food  in  sight,  allowed  the  working- 
man  who  needed  much  meat  to  buy  double  the  ra- 
tions permitted  to  others  with  more  money  but  less 
muscular  fatigue.  This  is  honest,  useful  democ- 
racy. Great  Britain  is  preparing  definitely  and 
carefully  to  house  her  laborers,  to  employ  them, 
and  to  educate  them  in  reconstruction.     Radical 


206  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

conservatives  and  radical  liberals  are  joining  in 
the  determination  that  such  simple  truths  as  the 
Heedlessness  of  poverty  and  the  necessity  of  rec- 
reation should  be  made  true  for  their  country. 
You  cannot,  as  Lloyd  George  said  the  other  day, 
make  an  Al  nation  from  C3  inhabitants.  The 
British  soldier  returning  from  a  simple  though 
dangerous  life  may  hope  perhaps  to  find  one  sim- 
pler than  hitherto  and  more  agreeable  awaiting 
him. 

What  are  we  doing  in  America  against  the  time 
when  Johnny  comes  home?  Are  we  still  satisfied 
with  congested  slums  in  a  land  of  broad  spaces ; 
with  masses  of  alien  illiterates  in  a  country  where 
education  is  general;  with  degradation  and  ugli- 
ness and  vulgarity  in  the  richest  country  in  the 
world.'*  Is  the  soldier  who  has  been  kept  clean, 
made  healthy,  and  taught  that  his  importance  to 
his  country  is  measured  by  his  ability,  not  his  bank 
balance,  to  be  asked  to  accept  the  old  system  as  a 
complex  necessity?  After  he  has  been  paid  in 
respect  and  thankfulness  and  honor  for  his  serv- 
ices, is  he  to  be  content  in  the  future  to  spend  his 
life  being  thankful  for  a  wage  or  a  salary  that  en- 
ables some  one  for  whom  he  cares  nothing  to  be- 
come richer  than  necessary?  Is  it  possible  that 
after  a  war  in  which  money  as  such  has  long  since 
lost  its  value,  we  will  still  believe  that  money-mak- 


WHEN  JOHNNY  COMES  HOME         207 

ing  in  the  future  as  in  the  past  is  the  only  duty  of 
America? 

The  war  lasted  too  long  for  Europe.  It  has 
brought,  with  much  good,  misery  and  some  failure 
and  degeneration  unnecessary  to  write  of  here.  In 
one  sense  it  lasted  too  long  for  America,  since  it 
has  destroyed  much  capital  and  more  lives,  actual 
and  potential,  than  we  can  yet  reckon.  But  it  has 
ended  too  quickly  if  we  have  been  merely  stirred 
out  of  our  armchairs  of  individualism  to  sink  back 
with  peace.  When  the  soldier  comes  home  he 
should  find  us  awake.  I  saw  in  a  back  street  of 
London  a  sign,  "  Business  as  usual  during  altera- 
tions," over  the  door  of  a  house  crushed  down, 
powdered  by  a  bomb  from  an  air  raid.  The  Amer- 
ican mind  is  doing  a  dangerous  amount  of  business 
as  usual,  during  alterations.  Take  the  sign  down 
before  the  alerte  sounds  and  the  boys  come  home. 


IX 

ON    SALVAGE   AND   WASTE 

It  was  in  June  of  1918  somewhere  on  the 
straight  roads  back  of  Arras  that  I  first  encoun- 
tered the  salvage  corps.  A  gigantic  truck 
ploughed  leisurely  through  waves  of  leave-march- 
ing Tommies.  Hanging  over  its  sides  or  perching 
on  the  piled-up  cargo  was  a  jolly  crew  in  overalls 
and  scratch  uniforms,  and  on  the  flank  in  sprawl- 
ing letters  of  chalk  was  scrawled,  "  What  have  you 
salved  to-day?  "  I  guessed  at  the  load  —  broken 
rifles,  dented  tins  of  bully  beef,  ammunition,  lost 
tents,  odd  shoes,  helmets,  revolvers,  biscuit  cans  — 
remembering  battle  fields  still  strewn  with  such 
wreckage.  And  I  recognized  in  these  cheery  indi- 
viduals the  miniscule  representatives  of  order, 
economy,  thrift  in  a  world  given  over  to  destruc- 
tion, the  pygmy  opponents  of  the  vast  Titan, 
Waste. 

They  were  symbols  of  all  of  us,  the  world  that 
has  been  fighting  so  tenaciously,  so  cheerfully,  to 
salvage  a  little  from  the  waste  of  war  —  the  sur- 
geons saving  life  when  legs  or  arms  were  gone,  the 
generals  saving  an  army  corps  when  half  its 
personnel  was  dead,  the  old  men  saving  the  nation 
after  the  young  men  were  gone  forever.  As  a 
spectacle  nothing  could  be  finer  —  or  more  pa- 
208 


;0N  SALVAGE  AND  WASTE  209 

thetic.  Salvage  is  always  pathetic.  It  is  excel- 
lent to  do  it  well ;  it  is  better  to  prevent  it. 

And  the  most  pathetic  salvage  of  this  war  was 
not  of  damaged  goods.  It  was  almost  a  satisfac- 
tion to  see  a  litter  of  things  we  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  call  valuable  wasted  on  a  battle  field,  and 
to  feel  how  little  the  loss  of  such  commodities  mat- 
tered in  comparison  with  waste  of  life.  It  restored 
a  true  perspective  and  made  one  appreciate  that 
the  standard  of  values  after  all  is  man.  Yet  I  do 
not  believe  that  even  the  waste  of  life  in  war  is  the 
most  pathetic  of  all  losses.  In  some  respects, 
what  struck  deepest  there  in  the  war  zone  was  the 
waste  of  energies ;  energies  which  had  been  sup- 
pressed or  diverted  in  peace  time,  now  flaring  up 
and  out  in  brief  wasteful  moments,  accomplishing 
much  for  others  but  little  for  themselves. 

I  wonder  if  we  will  remember  that  lesson,  now 
that  the  finest  energies  among  us  have  so  many  of 
them  burnt  out.  I  wonder  if  we  will  reconstruct 
a  dull,  mechanical  civilization  in  which  the  adven- 
turousness,  the  initiative,  the  craving  for  hardship 
and  sacrifice  and  honor  of  youth  can  find  outlet 
only  in  war  which  so  speedily  quenches  the  flame 
and  spreads  darkness  elsewhere.  Fine  minds  have 
responded  finely  to  this  war;  base  minds  basely. 
And  it  was  the  finest  that  were  the  first  to  force  the 
issue,  and  the  first  to  be  lost.  Was  it  right  that 
they  should  wait  for  war  to  use  their  best  energies.'* 
Is  salvage  after  waste  going  to  be  all  that  modern 
civilization  can  offer  a  mind  too  active  for  the  dull 
routine  and  low  ideals  of  peace,  as  peace  was  un- 
derstood in  1914?     Is  there  no  substitute  for  war.** 


«10  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

William  James  raised  the  question  years  before 
this  conflict.  In  our  search  for  insurance  of  com- 
fort and  preventatives  of  conflict,  we  are  in  danger 
once  more  of  leaving  it  unanswered.  If  the  pessi- 
mists force  us  to  answer  "  no,"  it  will  be  the  opti- 
mistic, energetic  youths  of  the  next  generation  who 
will  pay  the  price. 


WAR'S    ENDING 

I  climbed  in  1918  the  hill  of  Douaumont  beyond 
Verdun,  a  hill  torn,  swept,  and  harrowed  by  shrap- 
nel and  high  explosive  into  a  ghastly  paysage  de 
lune,  where  the  tread  was  always  among  pits  of 
dead  green  water,  and  the  foot  stumbled  upon  shell 
fragments,  rusted  wire,  rifle  butts,  or  broken  bone, 
and  the  eye  saw  other  hills  cut  to  the  sand,  and  the 
puff  of  shells  exploding.  At  the  top  was  what 
once  had  been  a  famous  fort  of  concrete,  now  blown 
to  bits  except  for  a  ruined  core  behind  which  a  few 
poilus  were  sheltered  in  patched  dug-outs,  waiting 
for  the  enemy,  a  lonely,  silent  group  in  a  lonely 
wilderness  of  desolation. 

"  Stoop  and  enter,"  said  our  Colonel.  We  bent 
to  enter  a  crumbling  hole  in  the  wall,  struck  our 
helmets  on  beams  of  a  dark  tunnel,  then  felt  it 
widen  and  lift,  until  suddenly  a  door  swung  open 
and  we  looked  blinking  into  a  great  hall  fiill  of 
light  and  the  sound  of  whirring  engines.  Soldiers 
were  everywhere,  great  guns  ready  to  rise  and  do 
execution,  vast  piles  of  munitions ;  and  beyond,  a 
honeycomb  of  chambers  and  corridors  in  which 
were  assembled  all  the  paraphernalia  of  defensive 
211 


212  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

war,  even  a  "  Salle  de  President  Wilson,"  where  in 
the  heart  of  the  hill  poilus  were  writing  and  read- 
ing. In  the  dripping  semi-gloom  was  the  organiza- 
tion of  a  city  underground,  garrisoned,  equipped, 
ready  for  siege  or  attack.  Above,  crumbling  ruins 
beyond  repair;  beneath,  a  new  creation  of  energy 
and  purpose.  This  is  no  parable:  it  was  a  real 
fort,  with  very  real  soldiers,  and  the  Germans  never 
took  it;  but  if  there  is  not  a  useful  parallel  here 
with  life  as  it  is  at  the  ending  of  the  war,  then 
similes  have  lost  their  power. 

I  am  weary  of  reading  accounts  of  how  the  war 
has  ennobled  sordid  human  nature.  Not  that  they 
are  untrue.  On  the  contrary,  the  half  has  not 
been  told,  and  before  I  finish  this  writing  I  shall 
hope  to  add  my  little  testimony  of  a  great  awaken- 
ing in  a  world  grown  commonplace.  But  if  we 
are  to  estimate  our  benefits  we  must  be  more  frank 
than  the  correspondents,  and  more  sober  than  the 
soldier  writers  aflame  with  their  own  moral  vic- 
tories. We  must  look  squarely  at  the  ruins  of  the 
old  order,  and  then  search  for  new  life.  We  must 
take  a  dose  of  stern  pessimism ;  face  the  facts ; 
acknowledge  our  casualties  of  life  and  will  and 
virtue;  and  then  go  after  the  rewards  stiU  unse- 
cured which  belong  to  those  who  have  fought  for 
a  good  ideal  against  a  bad  one. 

Inescapable  are  the  material  losses  of  the  war, 


WAR'S  ENDING  213 

and  most  of  all  in  men.  The  wounded,  the  sick, 
the  maimed,  and  the  dead  make  a  sad  human  paral- 
lel to  the  broken  pile  on  the  hilltop.  With  the  liv- 
ing there  is  new  life  and  hope  stirring  beneath  the 
surface.  The  sap  runs  strong  in  the  youthful 
wounded.  Seldom  do  they  admit  pessimism,  and 
then  it  is  because  their  nerves  are  still  twanging. 
Shattered  bodies  are  the  least  of  the  evils  we  have 
to  fear  for  the  future,  except  when  the  mind  shat- 
ters too.  But  it  is  different  with  the  dead.  Death 
is  loss.  They  will  not  come  back.  They  wiU  not 
do  what  we  hoped  of  them;  they  will  not  be  there 
to  help  when  we  need  them ;  a  longing  memory  does 
not  atone  for  a  smile  or  a  kiss  or  the  hand  of  a 
friend.  They  may  do  much  for  us  spiritually; 
nothing  more  in  the  flesh. 

It  is  different  too  with  the  unborn.  The  birth- 
rate has  been  dropping  with  frightful  rapidity.  In 
1917  the  births  in  England  and  Wales  fell  to  the 
lowest  level  since  1858.  Every  day  that  the  war 
continued,  so  the  British  Registrar-General  esti- 
mated, meant  a  loss  of  7,000  potential  lives  to 
Europe.  *'  While  the  war  has  filled  the  graves,  it 
has  emptied  the  cradles."  The  separations  of  war 
were  partly  responsible  and  these  have  largely 
ended.  But  the  effect  of  strain  and  stress  and 
labor  upon  women,  the  effect  of  wounds  and  hard- 
ship upon  men,  these  will  not  quickly  pass.     Life 


214  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

is  cheap  at  present ;  it  will  be  dear  in  the  future, 
especially  among  our  best.  We  shall  have  to  make 
it  more  worth  living  than  ever  before. 

We  can  face  with  more  equanimity  our  other 
material  losses.  Scientific  activity  has  been  so 
enormously  quickened  by  the  necessities  of  war 
that  our  credit  with  nature  has  been  turned  into 
cash  a  generation  before  its  normal  time  of  matur- 
ity. The  air  is  ours,  and  much  of  underseas. 
Nevertheless,  we  have  been  "  digging  in,"  not  ad- 
vancing in  our  conquest  of  the  elements.  Creative 
science  has  been  diverted  almost  entirely  from  re- 
search and  devoted  to  an  intensive  application  of 
principles  already  known. 

We  need  not  bewail  too  loudly  these  brains 
turned  to  the  immediately  practical,  for  our  con- 
trol of  nature  had  already  far  outdistanced  con- 
trol of  ourselves.  But  there  will  be  a  sad 
accounting  in  the  future  for  the  war's  destruc- 
tion of  capital  —  wealth,  food,  ships,  clothing,  and 
all  the  paraphernalia  of  civilization  to  an  amount 
which  no  one  yet  dares  calculate.  One  cannot,  it 
is  true,  be  pessimistic  over  the  mere  waste  of  goods. 
We  have  learned  that  our  wealth  is  subject  to  the 
welfare  of  the  community,  and  though  we  shall  all 
be  poorer  in  the  years  to  come,  even,  one  hopes,  the 
profiteers,  it  will  not  hurt  us  much,  if  distribution 
becomes   more   equitable.     Nevertheless,   the   war 


WAR'S  ENDING  215 

must  be  paid  for.  It  must  be  paid  for  by  the  in- 
evitable cession,  at  least  for  a  time,  of  many  great 
and  hopeful  movements  for  education  and  reform 
which  capital,  now  lost  or  diverted,  made  possible. 
We  need  not  be  troubled  because  in  the  next  gen- 
eration Adam  must  delve  and  Eve  spin;  but  men 
have  lost  part  of  their  reserves  of  power,  even  as 
they  have  destroyed  irretrievably  a  hundred  mon- 
uments of  irreplaceable  art  built  when  the  imagi- 
nation worked  itself  into  stone. 

There  is  nothing  in  these  material  losses  (at 
least  in  Great  Britain  and  America)  that  the 
sturdy-hearted  may  not  shoulder  through  to  the 
new  world  which  is  coming.  When,  however,  one 
views  the  effects  of  the  war  upon  our  minds  and 
whatever  spiritual  qualities  we  possess,  the  pros- 
pect is  grimmer.  Strip  away  for  the  moment  all 
proper  qualifications,  forget  (as  of  course  for  a 
true  picture  we  must  not  forget)  all  soul-cheering 
offsets  and  new  creations  of  good  that  have  come 
from  this  testing  time,  and  look  frankly  at  the 
darker  side. 

Morality  is  shaken,  especially  sex  morality. 
The  old  Victorian  order  was  passing,  had  to  pass, 
as  its  best  exemplar  prophesied: 

"  The  old  order  passeth,  giving  place  to  new, 

*'  And  God  fulfils  Himself  in  many  ways." 

It  is  not  God,  however,  but  some  haphazard 


216  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

chance  that  seems  to  be  fulfilling  itself  in  the  gen- 
eral slackening  of  the  moral  sense.  I  mean  no 
more  than  I  say.  I  do  not  mean  decadence;  I 
do  not  mean  corruption;  but  it  is  certain  that 
men  and  women  are  confused  and  doubtful  in 
their  judgments  of  sex  relations,  inconsistent 
in  their  actions,  less  sure  of  right  and  wrong 
than  before  in  this  generation.  As  the  church 
has  vacillated,  now  choosing  one  moral  attitude 
toward  war,  now  another,  so  men  and  women 
—  whose  lives  may  be  unexceptionable  —  are 
vacillating,  feeling  their  moral  sanctions  and  in- 
hibitions melting  beneath  them.  I  think  that  this 
had  to  come.  Perhaps  it  is  a  blessing,  not  an 
evil.  Much  of  it,  I  know,  is  transitory,  and  due 
to  the  mixing  of  races  and  the  state  of  war.  But 
it  is  not  a  happy  condition;  habits  formed  under 
it  will  be  hard  to  cure.  No  one  blamed  the  soldier 
for  recklessness  as  regards  wine,  women,  and  song, 
when  the  next  week  his  shell  might  burst ;  but  that 
does  not  lead  us  to  praise  the  exigency.  We  shall 
leave  Puritanism  in  its  priggishness  and  its  undue 
emphasis  of  sex,  behind  us  as  one  result  of  the  war ; 
that  is  clear,  and  good.  But  just  now  we  waver 
on  the  edge  of  new  moral  standards  whose  bounds 
and  sanctions  are  not  visible. 

There  would  have  been  a  moral  shift,  for  better 
or  worse,  without  the  war ;  careful  readers  of  con- 


WAR'S  ENDING  217 

temporary  literature  must  long  since  have  been 
convinced  of  that.  But  another  sign  of  the  times, 
the  muddying  of  men's  minds,  is  as  much  a  result 
of  the  conflict  as  the  deficiency  in  food  supply.  In 
1914,  we  saw  with  amazement  and  horror  official 
poison  curdle  the  clearest  German  intellects.  No 
such  perversion  of  the  reasoning  faculty  was  prob- 
able in  the  West,  because  we  were  not  under  the 
same  necessity  of  making  the  worse  appear  the 
better  reasoning,  nor  were  our  minds  so  porous  to 
inspired  suggestions.  But  let  us  not  rest  content 
with  an  assertion  of  superior  virtue.  We  were  not 
perfect  before  the  war  in  sanity  of  judgment  and 
clarity  of  desire. 

The  posters  of  hate  and  after-the-war-reprisal 
(a  very  different  thing  from  punishment)  which  in 
feeble  imitation  of  the  Hun  were  beginning  to  ap- 
pear here  and  in  England;  the  appeals  to  indis- 
criminate revenge  which  have  been  the  stock-in- 
trade  of  certain  sections  of  the  press  and  of  associ- 
ations more  patriotic  than  wise,  were  clearly  not 
signs  of  strength  but  of  weakness,  and  were  so  felt 
by  the  strong,  sane,  but  silent  majority  of  the 
people.  They  did  not  help  win  the  war ;  for  it  was 
jBi  sense  of  duty  and  moral  indignation  that  made 
men  fight  on  and  on,  as  they  had  to  do,  in  this  con- 
flict. And  these  muddier  passions,  due  in  England 
to  nerve  strain,  the  inevitable  result  of  four  ter- 


218  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

rible  years,  in  America  to  the  hysteria  of  sudden 
effort,  have  not  subsided  with  the  end  of  the  con- 
flict. They  are  transforming  into  a  greediness  for 
revenge,  a  desire  to  take  profit  as  well  as  humilia- 
tion from  the  beaten  enemy,  a  brutal  willingness 
to  gain  by  new-found  might,  even  at  the  expense 
of  allies  and  friends.  They  make  infinitely  diffi- 
cult a  peace  that  will  be  more  lasting  than  victory. 
But  though  nerve  strain  may  have  been  the  cause 
of  these  dangerous  tendencies,  it  is  not  the  thing 
itself.  The  brute  in  man  everywhere  has  been 
creeping  forth  on  leash.  At  the  beginning  of  the 
war  Germany  broke  the  leash  and  let  the  brute  run 
free.  We  loathed  her  for  it;  and  we  said  wisely 
that  in  the  end  she  would  pay ;  for  the  brute,  like 
the  fabled  giants,  is  as  stupid  as  he  is  strong.  He 
sees  no  further  than  the  nearest  enemy,  and  forgets 
that  the  more  savage  his  blows  the  greater  need 
and  therefore  the  greater  will  to  down  him.  We 
will  never  utterly  loose  him;  not  after  Belgium  in 
1914.  But  the  brute  crouches  in  all  of  us  and  is 
more  dangerous,  even  now  that  the  war  is  over, 
than  for  centuries  before.  He  has  tasted  blood 
and  violence  and  loot;  and  wants  more  of  them. 
Just  now  he  hunts  with  the  Bolsheviks,  but,  like  the 
Devil  of  the  Middle  Ages,  he  is  at  home  in  all  com- 
panies. Aggressive  capitalism,  selfish  nationalism, 
militarism  under  new  names  such  as  protection  of 


WAR'S  ENDING  219 

trade,  are  promising  fields  for  his  sport.  He  must 
be  watched.  The  German  brute  is  defeated;  the 
brute  universal  still  bides  his  time. 

More  still  must  be  brought  to  the  confessional. 
War,  we  know  well,  some  of  us  too  well,  is  the 
mother  of  self-sacrifice;  alas,  it  brings  cynicism 
also  in  its  train !  When  cynicism  enters  practical 
politics  and  becomes  the  policy  of  a  strong  nation, 
it  is  a  world  danger  and  must  be  scourged  to 
humility  at  any  cost  of  toil  and  bloodshed.  That 
was  the  head  and  front  of  the  German  offending; 
and  to  defeat  and  utterly  discredit  it  in  the  eyes 
of  their  world  as  well  as  ours,  was  a  duty  to  which 
above  all  others  we  were  pledged  in  this  war. 
There  is  as  yet  no  policy  of  cynicism  in  America 
and  the  Allies,  but  the  danger  of  moral  discourage- 
ment, which  cynically  lets  nature  take  her  own 
rough  course,  cannot  be  avoided  by  denying  its 
existence. 

I  well  remember  the  sweet-voiced  patronne  of  a 
little  hotel  in  what  had  once  been  a  Norman  shore 
resort,  deserted  then  save  for  women,  old  men,  and 
refugees.  "  We  were  so  comfortable  before  the 
war,"  she  said  plaintively,  "  all  friendly,  all  happy, 
the  strangers  and  us  here  together."  The  world 
had  played  her  a  trick ;  she  nursed  her  grievance 
and  despaired  of  the  world. 

Too  many  others,  when  every  ounce  of  energy  is 


220  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

needed,  have  sunk  back  because  of  the  war.  The 
world  has  played  them  a  trick  also.  It  proved  to 
be  inflammable  just  when  they  supposed  it  fire- 
proof. Now  that  the  blaze  is  out,  they  are  willing 
to  rebuild  the  same  old  tinder  box  and  relay  the 
same  old  rotten  hose.  War,  they  say,  is  inevitable. 
Why  try  new  devices  ?  The  old  will  serve  our  time. 
It  will  not  be  our  generation  that  has  to  fight 
again.  This  is  cynicism;  and  what  is  worse,  it  is 
nihilism,  not  the  less  dangerous  because  its  note 
of  gentle  resignation  is  easy  to  understand. 

Intolerance  is  an  aggravated  form  of  the  cynical 
disease,  and  more  censurable  because  more  unneces- 
sary— intolerance  such  as  we  have  scarcely  known 
among  ourselves  since  the  seventeenth  century. 
The  radical  pacifist  supplied  a  good  instance. 
With  him,  curiously  enough  for  a  man  who  ex- 
pected everything  of  human  nature,  the  moral 
weakening  showed  itself  in  a  distrust  of  all  who 
sought  his  ends  by  different  means.  I  attended  a 
famous  meeting  in  London  last  February  where 
the  government  was  execrated  by  men  of  no  mean 
position  for  failing  to  negotiate  with  Germany  six 
months  earlier  when  there  had  been  tentatives  of 
peace.  For  two  hours  I  listened  to  speech  after 
speech,  waiting  for  a  reference  to  Russia  and  the 
conditions  of  Brest-Litovsk.  Russia  was  not  once 
so  much  as  mentioned ;  and  yet  other  men  who  had 


WAR'S  ENDING  221 

the  noblest  ideals  of  Great  Britain  equally  at  heart, 
were  condemned  root  and  branch  because,  in  the 
light  of  this  infamous  settlement,  they  dared  not  in 
honesty  stop  the  war!  That  was  a  kind  of  cyni- 
cism ;  it  was  a  bad  kind,  for  it  was  no  more  nor  less 
than  moral  snobbery. 

The  pacifists  might  well  have  replied,  of  course, 
that  they  learned  intolerance  from  their  adver- 
saries. And  indeed  the  unmeasured  violence  of  the 
attacks  upon  non-resistants,  conscientious  ob- 
jectors, international  socialists,  and  other  honest, 
if  mistaken  men  with  whose  methods  of  concluding 
the  war  we  disagreed,  sprang  also  from  cynicism. 
It  was  the  cynicism  of  the  editor  and  the  public 
speaker  and  the  censor,  who  believed  that  the  com- 
mon man  could  not  be  trusted  to  discriminate  be- 
tween arguments  and  must  therefore  be  guarded 
against  all  but  official  thinking.  My  experience 
led  me  to  conceive  more  highly  of  the  common  man, 
especially  in  the  army,  than  of  the  judgment  of 
most  leader  writers  and  orators.  He  was  con- 
vinced of  the  justice  of  his  cause  and  would  have 
gained,  not  lost,  by  a  fuU  discussion  of  all  its  im- 
phcations.  From  poisonous  propaganda  intended 
to  breed  distrust  he  should  have  been  protected, 
and  also  from  morbid  and  unjustifiable  pessimism; 
but  hysteric  shrieks,  platitudinously  urging  him 
to  think  only  of  winning  the  war  and  not  why  he 


222  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

should  win  it,  did  no  good  and  (if  we  still  believe  in 
democracy)  must  be  supposed  to  have  been  an 
active  agency  for  future  ill. 

And  now  that  the  war  is  over,  we  begin  to 
glimpse  some  of  the  results.  Our  democracy, 
which  is  to  have  the  last  word  in  deciding  world 
conditions  for  the  future,  has  been  so  coddled  and 
protected  from  all  opinions  except  those  regarded 
as  correct,  that  its  education  in  international  pol- 
itics and  the  ultimate  causes  of  war  is  just  begin- 
ning, at  the  precise  time  when  it  must  confirm  or 
oppose  decisions  involving  the  welfare  of  the  next 
generation  and  perhaps  the  next  century.  Well- 
meaning  censors,  like  amateur  gardeners,  have 
pulled  up  good  plants  of  honest  criticism  and  let 
the  weeds  of  arbitrary  dictum  and  useful  but  mis- 
leading propaganda  grow  rankly.  If  the  man  in 
the  street  is  not  soon  taught  by  free  discussion 
what  justice,  equality,  liberty,  and  other  terms  now 
used  so  freely,  must  mean  if  carried  out  in  practice, 
there  will  be  a  sad  tale  to  tell  of  these  years  of 
war's  ending. 

But  the  cynicism  I  most  dislike  is  that  of  the 
neo-Prussian,  who,  with  the  echoes  of  his  last 
speech  on  international  rights  still  in  the  air,  and 
the  ink  of  his  leader  on  safeguarding  the  world 
against  the  German  not  yet  dry,  will  pass  without 
transition  to  a  poisonous  policy  of  after-the-war 


WAR'S  ENDING  223 

aggressiveness  in  trade  and  land-grabbing  and 
armament,  which  would  make  the  world  safe  for 
no  one,  certainly  not  for  himself.  I  talked  recently 
with  a  British  officer  who  had  been  in  seven  differ- 
ent prison  camps  in  Germany  and  experienced 
every  variety  of  treatment,  from  brutality  to  ut- 
most charity.  He  said  that,  between  evils,  he  pre- 
ferred the  Prussians  to  the  Bavarians  as  jailers. 
When  the  Prussian  was  harsh,  it  was  by  order,  and 
one  could  count  at  least  on  consistency ;  but  if  the 
Bavarian  was  cruel  it  was  because  of  irresponsible 
malignancy  for  which  there  was  no  rvde.  I  detest 
Prussian  ideas  and  Prussian  methods  alike;  but 
their  open  cynicism  has  one  advantage  over  the 
dilute  cynicism  of  their  imitators.  It  can  be 
fought  openly,  as  we  did  fight  it  until  the  end. 

These  then  are  our  losses.  Four  years  of  war 
have  told  upon  the  Allies.  They  are  scarred  like 
the  fort  on  the  hiU.  And  America's  brief  year  and 
a  half  5  although  our  profits  may  have  been  greater 
than  our  losses,  has  not  passed  without  leaving 
toxins  behind  it.  But  what  of  the  life  within.'' 
For  the  life  within  Great  Britain  I  think  I  can 
speak  with  some  assurance.  It  is  bubbling  with 
new  energies,  moral,  physical,  and  intellectual. 
The  parallel  with  the  hidden  activities  of  the  sub- 
terranean chambers  breaks  down,  for  regeneration 
in  Great  Britain  is  as  visible  as  degeneration,  and 


224  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

probably  more  significant.  If  the  weak  have  be- 
come weaker,  the  strong  have  become  stronger. 
Alas,  that  among  the  latter  the  war's  heaviest  cas- 
ualties have  come! 

Great  Britain  has  gained  in  character  as  much 
as  she  has  lost  in  wealth.  "  There  is  no  fool  like 
a  clever  young  fool,  and  we  have  bred  many  of 
them,"  I  heard  the  head  of  an  Oxford  College  say, 
"  but  the  war  has  done  them  good."  "  How?  "  I 
asked.  "  By  hurling  facts  at  them.  War  is  like 
a  game  where  you  are  definitely  '  out '  if  you  don't 
succeed  —  it  permits  of  no  arguing.  War  is  like 
the  universe.  '  I've  made  a  mistake,  but  I  couldn't 
help  it,'  says  the  man.  *  Out,'  says  the  universe. 
*  I'm  young,  and  I've  done  my  best.'  *  Out,'  says 
the  universe.    *  I  want  another  chance.'   *  Out ! '  " 

It  is  this  that  makes  and  hardens  character. 
Indeed,  character  has  been  hardened  in  Great 
Britain  (and  elsewhere)  as  certainly  not  for  a  cen- 
tury. One  saw  it  in  a  hundred  directions.  There 
was  the  mother  who  had  lost  her  sons  and  must 
carry  on  without  complaining.  There  was  the 
kindly  heart  who  had  learned  without  bitterness 
that  life  is  cruel  and  the  dark  spirit  still  regnant ; 
the  high-souled  boy  who  saw  his  life-plans  wrecked 
by  the  call  to  service,  and  dropped  them  with  quiet 
finality ;  the  creative  thinker  who  did  trivial  things 
cheerfully  for  small  but  useful  results.     One  felt 


WAR'S  ENDING  225 

a  new  tone  in  society.  Opinions  clashed  more  be- 
cause men  and  women  were  more  sincere ;  small  talk 
had  evaporated;  it  was  a  harder,  firmer  world,  in 
which  one  moved  in  humbleness  as  in  the  presence 
of  a  completed  sacrifice. 

It  was  a  simpler  world  too,  precisely  because  it 
had  more  character  and  was  therefore  more  honest. 
The  soldier  poetry  which  came  back  from  France 
was  not  the  rhetorical  patriotism  of  earlier  con- 
flicts ;  it  was  full  of  simple,  passionate  affection  for 
home  and  the  home  soil,  with  a  touch  of  mysticism 
in  it  which  suggested  that  love  of  man  and  woman, 
of  sunlight  and  the  woods,  went  deeper  than  in  the 
use  and  wont  of  before  the  war.  Read,  for  ex- 
ample, "  To  the  Dead  "  of  Gerald  Caldwell  Siordet, 
himself  since  killed  in  action  in  Mesopotamia: 

*'And  you  —  O !  if  I  call  you,  you  will  come 
Most  loved,  most  lovely  faces  of  my  friends 
Who  are  so  safely  housed  within  my  heart, 
So  parcel  of  this  blessed  spirit  land 
Which  is  my  own  heart's  England,  so  possest 
Of  all  its  ways  to  walk  familiarly.    .    .    . 
Then  we  can  walk  together,  I  with  you. 
Or  you,  or  you,  along  some  quiet  road. 
And  talk  the  foolish,  old  forgivable  talk. 
And  laugh  together.    .    .    . 
And  when  at  last,  by  some  cross-road. 
Our  longer  shadows,  falling  on  the  grass. 
Turn  us  back  homeward,  and  the  setting  sun 
Shines  like  a  golden  glory  round  your  head, 
Q 


826  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

There  will  be  something  sudden  and  strange  in  you. 

Then  you  will  lean  and  look  into  my  eyes, 

And  I  shall  see  the  bright  wound  at  your  side, 

And  feel  the  new  blood  flowing  to  my  heart, 

And  I  shall  hear  you  speaking  in  my  ear  — 

O !  not  the  old,  forgivable,  foolish  talk 

But  flames,  and  exaltations,  and  desires  .... 

That  like  immortal  birds  sing  in  my  breast. 

And,  springing  from  a  fire  of  sacrifice. 

Beat  with  bright  wings  about  the  throne  of  God." 

Indeed)  forests  were  still  green  and  flowers 
bloomed,  and  we  saw  them  gladly;  the  comedian 
did  his  turn  for  laughing  London,  and  it  was  right 
to  laugh.  Man  was  still  man,  though  made  very 
elementary  by  his  tragedies,  and  it  was  this  sim- 
plicity as  much  as  anything  that  brought  England 
safely  through  the  war. 

Character  alone  may  sometimes  save  a  race,  but 
it  has  not  always  averted  defeat,  or  eclipse  after 
victory.  There  must  be  creative  energy  becoming 
active,  not  merely  stoical,  under  misfortune.  My 
answer  to  those  who  say  that  England  (which  is 
still  the  heart  of  our  English-speaking  world)  is 
decadent,  would  be  a  simple  one ;  they  do  not  know 
the  new  England;  not  all,  or  even  most  Britons 
know  it  yet.  England  reminds  me  of  a  vast  mili- 
tary tank,  crusted  with  an  armor  of  precedent, 
weighed  down  by  a  tremendous  burden,  creaking, 
protesting,  yet  irresistibly  driven  forward  over 


WAR'S  ENDING  227 

gulf  and  up  precipice.  England,  with  her  stiff 
conservatives,  her  sluggish  peasantry,  her  sodden 
poor,  is  yet  aquiver  with  new  thoughts  and  new 
movements,  that  responded  with  tenacious  vitality 
to  every  call  of  this  exhausting  war,  and  are  now 
bent  upon  salvage  and  reconstruction.  There  is 
not  a  department  of  life,  from  the  church  to  fac- 
tory routine,  that  is  not  under  fierce  criticism  and 
in  process  of  confused  but  determined  remaking. 

To  the  visitor  it  seems  muddle  —  the  new  un- 
tangling itself  from  the  old  only  to  be  hopelessly 
retangled.  Yet  I  think  it  is  not  all  muddle,  but 
rather  that  whirling  chaos  from  which  worlds  that 
endure  are  born.  Education  must  be  extended,  for 
England  finds  that  she  is  a  span  behind  her  neigh- 
bors. A  bill  is  offered,  is  half  passed,  half  lost, 
but  the  principle  saved  for  the  future.  With  a 
heave,  the  relations  of  labor  and  capital  are 
brought  a  whole  generation  forward,  then  left  to 
be  fought  over  when  there  is  leisure  for  such  war- 
fare. Everywhere  the  rough  facts  of  failure, 
backsliding,  complacency,  inefficiency,  are  received 
with  a  hurly-burly  of  conflicting  solutions,  in  the 
midst  of  which  changes  and  betterments,  so  radical 
that  we  Americans  stare,  slip  in  almost  unnoticed. 
England  is  alive  with  ideas  for  the  future,  both  re- 
actionary and  progressive,  but  all  sprung  from 
love  of  the  nation.     It  is  a  phenomenon  that  one 


228  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

does  not  find  in  stoical  France,  nor  widely  in  cheer- 
ful, enthusiastic  America,  and  it  is  highly  signifi- 
cant. The  technique  and  even  the  completed  the- 
ory of  possible  world  salvation,  now  that  the  war  is 
over,  may  come  from  elsewhere,  but  the  drive  and 
the  practical  experiment  will  be  most  of  all  Eng- 
land's. Slow,  strong-hearted,  deep-thinking  island 
that  she  is  —  America  cannot  but  impatiently  ad- 
mire her. 

One  instance  will  indicate  the  quality  of  this 
new  energy  better  perhaps  than  all  the  manifold 
activities  of  the  swarming  Ministry  of  Recon- 
struction, more  than  the  elaborate  plans  already 
authorized  for  rehousing  English  agricultural 
laborers,  as  much  perhaps  as  the  open  prepara- 
tions that  "  landed  "  folk  are  making  for  living 
differently  in  a  coming  era  when  wealth  will  not  be 
allowed  to  waste.  On  the  old  sign  board  at  the 
entrance  to  Christchurch  Meadows  in  Oxford,  I 
read  last  summer  in  characters  of  the  early  nine- 
teenth century,  "  Admittance  refused  to  persons 
in  ragged  or  very  dirty  clothing,"  and  remembered 
how  Jude  the  Obscure  in  Hardy's  novel  was  kept 
out  by  poverty  from  those  Oxford  Colleges  where 
the  nourishment  his  mind  craved  was  to  be  found. 
It  was  in  Balliol  (the  very  college  whose  Master 
advised  Jude  to  keep  to  his  own  laboring  sphere) 
that  before  the  war  the  Workmen's  Educational 


WAR'S  ENDING  229 

Association  began — that  organization  now  spread 
through  Great  Britain  and  spreading  through  the 
Colonies,  in  which,  as  I  have  already  explained, 
worker  and  student  come  into  contact  in  informal 
classes  to  the  great  advantage  of  both.  And  now 
everywhere  in  Great  Britain  working-men  are 
springing  up  in  the  labor  parties  who  understand 
both  the  needs  of  common  man  and  those  economic 
laws  which  penalize  unrestrained  radicalism;  and 
everywhere  intellectual  men  made  practical  by 
association  with  the  workers  are  joining  with  them, 
until  the  W.  E.  A.  has  become  not  a  party,  but  a 
force  in  all  parties,  conservative,  liberal,  radical, 
making  for  a  new  order  which  shall  be  neither  Bol- 
shevik nor  exploitative.  We  could  have  had  this 
fortunate  outcome  without  the  war  perhaps;  but 
not  so  readily  or  so  soon. 

As  for  America,  does  anyone  yet  know  what  has 
happened  to  America  as  a  result  of  the  war.?  Of 
one  thing  only  we  may  be  sure,  energy  has  been 
loosed  here  also,  an  energy  of  service  and  public- 
mindedness  such  as  may  well  combat  and  drive 
from  our  arteries  the  toxins  of  self-regarding  indi- 
vidualism long  gathering  there,  and  the  newer 
microbes  of  violence,  lawlessness,  conceit,  and  sus- 
picion which  the  war  has  engendered.  For  three 
reasons  —  and  there  may  be  many  more  —  even  a 
pacifist  must  be  glad  that  we  chose  the  way  of  war 


930  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

and  responsibility  in  the  Spring  of  1917.  For  the 
first,  we  have  moved  forward  a  whole  generation 
toward  national  unity  and  homogeneity.  Next, 
the  taste  for  public  service  has  become  common 
and  will  be  gratified,  until  the  price  of  loyalty  from 
the  worker  becomes  an  opportunity  to  serve  the 
community  as  well  as  the  employer  or  the  capital- 
ist. And  third,  we  realize  now,  even  though  we 
see  the  future  dimly,  that  America  is  irretrievably 
involved  in  the  fate  of  world  civilization,  and  must 
assume  responsibilities  in  measure  with  her 
strength. 

Here  then  are  two  accounts,  ragged  and  incom- 
plete, but  standing  one  over  against  the  other.  The 
debit  side  is  dark,  darker  it  may  be  than  my  imper- 
fect generalizations,  how  dark  only  the  future  can 
tell.  Europe  has  been  "  gassed  "  by  the  war,  and 
America  more  than  she  realizes,  that  much  is  cer- 
tain ;  the  symptoms  are  evident  but  not  the  extent 
or  the  gravity  of  the  harm.  Mustard  gas,  I  be- 
lieve, leaves  no  permanent  ill  effect  behind,  though 
for  a  while  it  makes  the  victim  a  red  and  prickly 
rack  of  nerves.  Many  are  suffering  from  mental 
mustard  now.  But  the  deadlier  gases  have  done 
their  evil  work  too :  let  us  face  that  fact  and  make 
allowances. 

The  virtues  sprung  from  the  war,  like  the  mate- 
rial losses  of  capital  and  life,  are  easy  to  name  and 


WAR'S  ENDING  231 

define.  What  is  doubtful  is  not  so  much  their 
abiding  value  —  character,  and  energy,  and  that 
new  breadth  of  international  vision  which  for  want 
of  space  I  have  only  mentioned,  cannot  fail  to  be 
valuable  —  but  rather  their  power  to  bolster  up 
this  poor  old  tottering  world  through  the  ominous 
days  of  relaxation  that  must  follow  an  exhausting 
war.  Personally,  I  do  not  belong  to  the  doubters. 
I  cannot  be  pessimistic,  even  in  the  company  of  the 
jolly  optimist  who  says,  "  Germany  is  beaten,  and 
now  everything  wiU  be  just  as  it  was  before  the 
war."  Germany  is  happily  beaten,  but  nothing 
will  be  just  as  it  was  before  the  war,  not  even  our 
souls.     I  have  faith  that  we  shall  be  better  men. 

One  certain  conclusion  can  be  drawn,  however; 
indeed,  postering  on  every  blank  wall  could  not 
make  it  more  evident.  Fine  minds  have  been  finely 
touched  by  the  war,  and  base  minds  basely. 

By  fine  I  do  not  mean  re-fined,  or  fine  with  an 
esthetic  or  spiritual  reference  merely.  I  mean  in 
the  good  colloquial  sense  of  "  he  is  a  fine  fellow," 
whether  a  dockman  or  waiter  or  clergyman  or  col- 
lege president  is  intended.  The  finest  fellow  I  met 
in  1918  was  an  American-Italian  orderly  at  the 
front,  whose  heart  was  absorbed  in  the  care  of  a 
reckless  young  army  doctor  to  whom  he  was  at- 
tached. And  I  think  often  of  the  half  wild  Cor- 
sican  and  the  wholly  wild  Apache  of  Paris  who 


232  EDUCATION  BY  VIOLENCE 

protected  my  friend,  a  young  French  lieutenant, 
one  on  either  side  in  charge  or  retreat,  and  "  moth- 
ered "  him  when  he  was  ill  in  the  trenches.  Such 
men  as  these  have  been  made  into  raw  material  for 
reconstruction  by  the  war:  finer  minds  in  the  in- 
tellectual sense  of  the  word  have  been  roused  to  a 
pitch  of  leadership  and  creative  energy  not  equaled 
since  the  early  Renaissance.  And  furthermore, 
there  are  the  millions  of  women  who  have  flung 
themselves  into  the  conflict  without  incurring  the 
passionate  reactions  of  bloodshed,  and  are  trans- 
formed into  a  power  for  good  we  cannot  yet 
measure. 

But  base  minds  have  become  baser,  uncertain 
souls  less  certain  still ;  and  unfortunately  it  is  the 
hearts  of  gold  and  not  of  lead  who  have  gone  most 
eagerly  to  death.  France  has  lost  the  flower  of 
the  next  generation ;  one  in  five  perhaps  of  the  uni- 
versity men  of  England  is  dead ;  not  many  in  pro- 
portion, but  too  many  of  the  best  boys  of  America 
have  been  left  on  the  Western  front.  And  there- 
fore, upon  those  of  us,  whether  young  or  old,  who 
feel  the  world  is  worth  remaking  and  are  left  for 
the  task,  a  tremendous  responsibility  descends. 
The  dead  have  died  for  no  lust  of  conquest  or  per- 
sonal reward,  but  to  save,  as  they  hoped,  their 
country.  It  is  for  the  living  to  see  to  it  that  the 
world  is  really  saved.     No  plans  of  federation  or 


WAR'S  ENDING  233 

defense,  however  wise,  can  secure  the  future,  unless 
those  whom  this  war  has  made  strong  can  lift  to 
safety  those  whom  it  has  made  weak. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  Amerio*. 


THE  following    pages  contain  advertisements    of 
Macmillan  books  by  the  same  author. 


Our  House 

By  henry  SEIDEL  CANBY 

Cloth,  izmo. 
,  Mr.  Canby,  known  as  a  teacher  of  literature  and 
critic,  also  as  a  writer  of  books  on  literary  subjects, 
has  written  a  novel,  and  one  of  singular  appeal.  Its 
central  character  is  a  young  man  facing  the  world, 
taking  himself  perhaps  over-seriously,  but  genuinely 
perplexed  as  to  what  to  do  with  himself.  Coming 
back  from  college  to  a  sleepy  city  on  the  borders  of 
the  South,  his  problem  is,  whether  he  shall  subside 
into  local  business  affairs,  keep  up  the  home  which 
his  father  has  struggled  to  maintain,  or  whether  he 
shall  follow  his  instinct  and  try  to  do  something 
worth  while  in  literature.  This  problem  is  made 
intensely  practical  through  the  death  of  his  father. 
The  story  of  what  the  young  man  does  is  exceedingly 
interesting.  It  takes  the  hero  to  New  York  and  into 
the  semi-artificial  life  of  young  Bohemia  and  ulti- 
mately brings  him  back  home  where  he  finds  the  real 
happiness  and  success. 


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The  Vision  For  Which  We  Fought 

By  ARTHUR  M.  SIMONS 

Cloth,  izmo.  $1.50. 

A  vision  of  the  new  world  grew  out  of  the  war,  be- 
came the  object  of  the  war  and  transformed  it  into  a 
crusade.  The  foundations  of  that  vision  were  laid 
during  the  war  as  a  part  of  the  work  of  mobilizing  the 
nations  involved.  This  worked  a  social  revolution 
that  if  now  taken  advantage  of,  will  avoid  the  violent 
upheaval  that  otherwise  threatens.  What  awaits  us 
now,  is  not  reconstruction,  but  conscious  continuance 
of  processes  already  well  under  way.  Industry  has 
been  systematized,  labor  mobilized,  schools  socialized, 
human  life  safeguarded  and  human  selfishness  largely 
swallowed  up  in  patriotic  solidarity. 

The  vision  for  which  we  fought  has  taken  form  in 
the  midst  of  the  fight.  Its  completion  is  the  last 
essential  step  to  insure  victory. 

Mr.  Simons  discusses  vigorously  these  questions. 
His  book,  which  is  published  in  The  Citizens'  Library 
Series  under  the  editorship  of  Dr.  Richard  T.  Ely,  is 
one  which  every  student  of  political  affairs  and  every- 
one who  is  looking  forward  to  the  reconstruction  period, 
can  read  with  profit. 


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TWO  NEW  BOOKS  ON  RUSSIA 


War  and  Revolution  in  Russia,  1914-1917 

By  General  BASIL  GOURKO 

The  Ex-Chief  of  the  Russian  Imperial  General  Staff 

III.  Cloth,  S°,  $4.00 

General  Gourko's  memoirs  are  of  real  historic  interest.  Here  is  a  record 
describing  events  from  the  mobilization  of  the  Russian  army  to  the 
time  of  the  Tsar's  abdication.  By  that  time  General  Gourko  had  re- 
signed and  had  been  arrested  and  confined  in  the  fortress  of  Sts.  Peter 
and  Paul.  The  descriptions  of  battles  and  campaigns,  of  the  crucial 
winter  of  1915-16,  of  the  entry  into  Roumania,  are  the  first  to  be  printed 
from  the  point  of  view  of  a  general  on  the  field.  The  murder  of  Raspu- 
tin, the  political  changes  preceding  the  revolution,  Kerensky's  first 
steps  in  government,  the  first  effects  of  the  revolution  —  all  these  things 
are  faithfully  and  dispassionately  reported.  The  book  is  dedicated  to 
the  general's  heroic  wife,  who  was  killed  when  the  Germans  shelled  a 
bandaging  station  behind  the  French  lines. 


Recollections  of  a  Russian  Diplomat 

By  Baron  EUGENE  DE  SCHELKING 

Illustrated,  $2.50 

Besides  being  an  amazing  and  stirring  story,  this  is  a  permanently  im- 
portant historical  document.  It  epitomizes  the  case  of  the  people  and 
democratic  government  against  government  by  autocracies  and  sham- 
ming chancellories.  The  writer  escaped  from  Russia  by  pawning  his 
wife's  jewels.  He  came  to  Canada  and  electrified  the  readers  of  Amer- 
ican papers  by  his  revelations  of  court  life  in  the  Balkans.  He  foresaw 
the  inevitable  end  of  monarchy :  there  never  was  a  clearer  case  of  suicide. 
His  volume  opens  with  an  account  of  the  closing  years  of  the  reign 
of  Alexander  III ;  then  comes  the  story  of  Nicholas  and  his  ministers. 
The  German  Emperor  and  his  relations  with  Nicholas,  the  leading 
actors  in  the  Balkan  affairs,  the  negotiations  preceding  Roumania's 
entrance  into  the  war,  the  conditions  of  the  court  under  the  influence 
of  Rasputin,  and  the  character  of  the  chief  ministers,  are  some  of  the 
topics  taken  up  in  the  different  chapters.  ^  Finally  there  is  a  section 
discussing  the  course  of  the  Russian  Revolution. 


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*'  Brilliant  Synthesis  of  the  World's  Peace  Problems  '* 

The  Great  Peace 

By  H.  H.  powers 

Author  of  "America  Among  the  Nations,"  "The  Things  Men 
Fight  For,"  etc.       j 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $2.2^ 

"What  shall  be  the  terms  of  the  peoples'  peace  —  the 
Great  Peace?  What  are  the  principles  of  that  better  state- 
craft which  has  been  slowly  and  half  unconsciously  taking 
shape  in  the  minds  of  those  who  through  the  will  to  victory 
have  slowly  won  the  right  to  will  the  world's  peace?  And 
what  do  these  principles  require  in  the  way  of  concrete  ad- 
justments and  arrangements  among  the  mountains  and  the 
rivers  and  the  seas  where  men  have  chanced  to  be  born  and  have 
snugly  nested  themselves  in  the  traditions,  the  prejudices, 
the  loves,  and  the  hates  of  a  hundred  generations?"  It  is 
with  such  questions  as  these  that  Dr.  Powers  is  concerned. 

"The  necessity  for  speed  laid  upon  the  author  found  him 
amply  prepared  by  study,  travel,  training  and  practice. 
However  hurried  his  task  of  writing,  his  arguments  and 
conclusions  are  manifestly  results  of  long,  earnest,  soberly 
measured  and  carefully  digested  thought.  Presented  in  the 
author's  graphic,  comprehensive  and  impressive  style,  they 
constitute,  in  eflPect,  a  clue  to  the  vast  labyrinth  through  which 
the  Versailles  conference  must  shortly  wander  distraught." 

"The  peace  conferees  took  a  dictionary  and  encyclopedia 
along  for  a  library.  They  should  add  Mr.  Powers'  book  — 
it  would  be  helpful  amid  even  a  stock  of  universal  knowl- 
edge." —  The  Philadelphia  North  American. 

"The  terms  of  peace  to  be  agreed  upon  must  be  based  on 
the  fullest  recognition  of  the  special  problems  and  wishes  of 
the  associated  nations.  The  problem  of  problems  is  the 
control  of  the  sea.  .  .  .  These  questions  are  discussed  with 
thoughtfulness  and  clarity,  and  a  wide  grasp  of  circum- 
stances and  difficulties."  —  The  Detroit  Free  Press. 


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OTHER  BOOKS  BY  HENRY  SEIDEL  CANBY 


English  Composition  in  Theory  and  Practice 

By  henry  SEIDEL  CANBY  and  Others 

Cloth,  i2mo.  $1.40  net. 
A  thoroughly  practical  book  of  directions  for  good  writing, 
based  upon  sound  principles.  An  extensive  collection  of  examples 
drawn  from  all  the  forms  of  discourse  and  inclusive  of  brief  ex- 
cerpts and  complete  essays  is  also  included.  The  authors,  who 
are  professors  of  English  composition  in  the  Sheffield  Scientific 
School  of  Yale  University,  have  so  handled  their  subject  that  the 
work  is  not  limited  to  any  one  class  of  students,  but  is  of  a  general 
interest  to  all  concerned  in  the  writing  of  good  English. 


Elements  of  Composition 


By  HENRY  SEIDEL  CANBY  and  JOHN  BAKER  OPDYCKE 

III.  i2mo. 
The  Means  of  Comp>osition,  The  Ends  of  Comf>osition,  The 
Aids  to  Composition,  these,  the  subjects  of  the  three  parts  into 
which  Henry  Seidel  Canby  and  Johii  Baker  Opdycke  divide  the 
discussion  in  their  new  book,  Elements  of  Composition,  well 
indicates  its  character  and  content.  The  volume  is  one  which 
will  be  of  interest  and  assistance  to  all  those  who  are  working  in 
the  cause  of  simple,  expressive,  accurate  speech  and  writing  as 
well  as  those  who  are  striving  to  attain  these  things  for  themselves. 

Facts,  Thought  and  Imagination 

By  Professors  H.  S.  CANBY,  F.  E.  PIERCE,  W.  H.  DURHAM 
Of  Sheffield  Scientific  School,  Yale  University 

Cloth,  i2mo.  $i.jo. 
Three  books  which  form  a  good  combination  for  Freshman 
English  Composition  courses.  "English  Composition"  has  for 
several  years  been  extensively  used  as  a  text  for  normal  Freshman 
students,  and  a  careful  revision  during  this  period  of  time  has 
made  it  more  than  ordinarily  satisfactory.  "Manual  of  Good 
EngUsh"  will  be  found  a  valuable  supplement  to  this  text,  for 
it  is  intended  primarily  as  a  review  of  authorized  practice  in 
English  Composition,  and  as  a  book  of  reference  particularly  for 
such  students  as  are  defective  in  the  essentials  of  good  English. 
"Facts,  Thought  and  Imagination"  is  designed  as  a  text  for 
advanced  Freshman  or  Sophomore  students.  It  does  not  place 
the  emphasis  on  rhetorical  drill,  but  on  the  thing  to  be  written 
and  how  to  write  it.       

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